Transcript

0:00

Alright, gang. Let's dive right into it. Welcome to another edition of Webinar Wednesday. It's really, really great to be with everyone here today. If this is your first time joining us, welcome.

0:12

We do see some new names and faces out there in the audience. I am Jason there on the left and we are lucky to be joined by David Rocklin who is the digital strategist and so much more here at BD. David, thanks for taking the time to join us in this webinar. Hey everybody, glad to be back with you for another webinar. Got some great updates and a really good, tip of the week coming up, with a lot of actionable steps that you can take.

0:36

So looking forward to this one. A little bit about, today's webinar, we are streaming on YouTube live. If you're not already subscribed to the BD YouTube channel, highly recommend doing it. You can go to brilliantdirectories.com/ youtube and click on that red subscribe button. It's the best way to get alerted as soon as we upload, new webinar replays, tips of the week, feature tutorials, and more.

1:01

What's also good about streaming the webinar on YouTube live is immediately after the webinar, we will post the replay link in the BD Facebook group. Also invite you to join us there. You can go to brilliantdirectories.com/facebook. So if we cover something a little too quickly or you wanna recap something that we covered in today's webinar, it will be immediately available just shortly after, the webinar is completed. Also in the Facebook group, tons of constructive discussions and conversations, new people working on their site, seasoned people, growing their sites and sharing their milestones that they're hitting.

1:39

So great place if you're looking for some inspiration and motivation to work on your website project. And we do see a good handful of new names and faces out there. Welcome everyone. I see, Philip here. Nice to see you.

1:52

And Tess, good to see you there. And we have our good friend, Wilf, joining us in the webinar as well. Just a little bit about webinar Wednesday. You know, BD is very busy week after week, pushing new features and updates, small fixes into the platform. And webinar Wednesday is really a good way for us to share some of those newer features right away as soon as they're released with you guys.

2:13

And we like to focus on features that can help you grow your community, things that you can take actionable steps on right away. So we'll cover things on how to increase website traffic, converting visitors to members, identifying revenue opportunities. Today's webinar, the tip of the week actually will cover how to improve your website's navigation and a little bit of search engine optimization as well. So stay tuned when we get to the tip of the week. I think this is gonna be one that everyone can take away something, from.

2:42

And just before we dive into that tip of the week, we have a good handful of BD lab updates to share with everyone. So I'll breeze through this list here, I'll show you some examples that I can, and then we'll move on to the tip of the week. So the top two at the top there, the media manager and the text editor, we've now, introduced free stock photos for everybody in the admin area, both in the media manager and also when you're working in the text editor of the admin area. Let me quickly show you for those of you who have not seen this yet, how to access that and how you can use that on your website. So let me just go to the admin area here of a test site.

3:26

So first in the media manager, let's go there. And you access the media manager here in the my content section. Also, if you're choosing like a hero background image for your homepage, you get the media manager pop up. What you're gonna see here now is the photos by pixels, link, and we can search for things like we'll just search for like an island and horizontal. Maybe I'm choosing a background image here, and we can see we have these images here.

3:55

Also you can choose vertical or square orientations, and then all you do is you select your size. So what's nice about this is, you can choose between three sizes. So based on where you're gonna be using this image, if it's a background image, you're gonna wanna use the larger size. If it's a small little thumbnail that you're gonna, insert into a landing page in the corner of the page, you probably wanna use a small or a medium sized image. But you choose your size, you click download, and the image has now been added into your media manager.

4:28

And we can see it right here. And then you can go ahead and select that and use it, throughout your site. Now the web page builder, that was a separate project for us, but we've now introduced the the Pexels stock photos in the web page builder as well. So let me show you an example of that. We'll go to new web page.

4:46

And if you're creating a landing page, here in the insert image, toolbar option, you'll now see the pixels and this is available for everyone. And we'll go ahead and it's really the same, the same method here. I'll just type background here and search. And you could see we have access to all these images here. And in this case, you choose your size, small, medium, or large.

5:11

And when you hit that arrow button, it should insert it directly into here. And of course, it's a webinar and it's chosen not to. Let's give that one more try here. We'll search for joy and we'll choose small and we'll insert it there. There we go.

5:26

Okay. So it will insert it there. What's also nice about this in the text editor is if you're pulling something from one of the content blocks, the premade elements here, you can click on it. And if you wanna replace kind of the the default image that comes with the block, you can just click on the, replace icon and then choose pixels here. And we'll just do happy.

5:50

And here you can again do what you wanna do and it should add it directly there and it replaces it right there. So what's nice is you can pull some blocks in here and then quickly just find some, you know, images or placeholder images that you wanna use on landing pages and work on it directly in the editor here. Okay, this next one is related to SEO. It's also related to images but not stock photo images. When your members upload images, for like blog posts and things like that or photo albums, the system automatically assigns a unique file name.

6:25

And generally, the alt text is something generic that matches the post title. For those who are looking to edge their SEO, there is now a method to edit the alt or enhance, I'll say, enhance the alt text and the file name of a post image. I don't think everyone needs to do this. Google's gotten a lot smarter at knowing what images are what images are, not only based on the content around them, but there's starting to use AI to just know what's in the images, themselves. But, for those of you who are looking to edge your SEO a bit, if you go to manage posts, here we can see these are coupon posts.

7:06

If we go to actions, we can see edit image data, and that will be the featured image of the, the coupon post. And here we can see, that we can edit the image file name. So if I wanted to change it from, you know, it was matching kind of the, the post title or something related to the member that's kind of the the normal convention for this, you can do, Los Angeles, you know, pizza coupon. And that will be the file name of it. And then you can add, alt text here, that would then be used on the front end when this image is, being used.

7:42

So you can do Los Angeles pizza coupon. And let me show you one more thing about this and go ahead and save your changes. So the file name and the alt text has been modified. Now for photo albums that have multiple photos, we did go a step further. Let me see if I can find one.

7:59

I can't find one here, that on this test site. But when you do the edit image data and there are multiple photos in a photo album or like a classifies ad, you'll see two arrows here and you can go through all the photos in that photo album, and do the same thing. And if you mess up, you can always revert back to the, the system default there, with this little button. So that's available for anyone who's looking to edge their SEO a bit related to post images. This next one is related to smart list.

8:31

Let's just go there together. Essentially when you create a smart list, you're creating a segment, a segmented group of users who, who meet certain criteria. For example, if you wanna create a group of your California members who are inactive, you can create a smart list, just of that segmented group. And there have always been these numbers here on the size, the side that says list size. And up until now when you click it, we could see here subscribe to post updates newsletter.

9:05

If we click it, it does take us to, the page and there should be 13 here as well. There are actually 17. This was the update is when you create a new smart list, these old smart list, the numbers were inaccurate or not linking to the correct, pages. But now when you create a new smart list, and I created a new one here, so if you have smart list and you want this to work properly, just go ahead and recreate the smart list. It's fine.

9:34

Here's a new contact us form inquiries. When you click on this, a couple things happen. It's going to pre filter and it's gonna show the correct, users. Before it was just showing you everyone. So we can see here this is the contact people who filled out the contact form.

9:49

That's the smart list I created. Let's actually create one smart list together and then see it in action. So basically, we corrected the total counts not linking to the correct page with pre filtered with the correct filters. So if we just recreate your smart list now, those numbers will work, correctly. So we have a member here in Austin, Texas.

10:10

So let's actually do a search for, Austin, Texas. We'll do a search. And we have two members who meet that criteria. Let's create a smart list. We'll call it Austin, Texas members, and we'll close this.

10:25

Let's go to smart list now. And we see here the number two. And when we click on this, we have an error because it is a demo. But what's gonna happen is and we'll share this with the team. You're gonna see that it's pre filtered with Austin, Texas, and you'll see the members there.

10:41

Prior to this, it wasn't doing any pre filtering when you're clicking on those numbers. This was just released, so we'll, sort out these small quirks, but those should be working for the majority of users now and we'll fix out and iron out any of those issues there. This next one also related to exports. You can now we recently released the ability to import posts via CSV and also through Zapier if you're gonna use the API. Now you can export your post to a CSV file.

11:09

So if you want to export all your blog articles and use them on another platform or just save them for a rainy day in your for yourself, or if you want to, export them, make some changes locally on your computer and then reimport them, you can certainly do that too. Over here, what we wanna do is go to manage posts and what you'll see is the export list of current post results. So it's gonna be based on the pane that you're in, the tab that you're in. So if we're looking at coupons or events or discussions, that's what you're gonna export as well as any filters you have set. So if you're searching for ones with the word tour in it and we did an export, it would just export this event post, for tour of Los Angeles.

11:57

So, you do need the export, data add on for your site and that includes a a a wide array of, areas where you can export data from your site. But now that now includes the ability to export posts from your site, And we've done it so so that if you do export posts from your site and you wanted to reimport them to your site, you don't even need to modify the file as long as the author of the post, the ID of the member that is the author of the post exists on the site you're importing to, you should be all good to go. And lastly here, those, who use CSS or historically have used PHP to hide certain content on your site, whether a member is logged in or not logged in. We've now made it super easy. This is more for the designers and developers out there, who are looking to hide certain elements based on if a member is logged in versus a regular visitor.

12:54

I'll show you a quick example. Again, this is an intermediate level for designers and developers out there. But if we go to the front end of a site now, and you can see that I'm logged in here on this sample site to a sample member, Jamie complete auto service. If we look at the body tag, what we've done is we've added a class here right there. We can see that the class is user session and we know also that their membership their plan is level one.

13:20

Now if we go and check somebody who is not logged in, I have another browser here. And if we look at the body tag here, we can see that the body tag class is general session. So what you can start doing is you can start creating CSS rules like general session. And if you wanna target like a button on your site like this red one to not show when somebody's logged in or log or vice versa, You can do general session and then the, you know, the element you're targeting, and this will be for general visitors, and you could do like a display none. So what I've done on this site as an example is when you're not logged in as a general user I mean, you're not logged in as a member.

14:02

If you scroll down, we have this red link in the footer. So I created a CSS rule. So when you are logged in, you don't see this button. I've targeted this button based on its class. And here I am logged into JNE Complete Auto Service.

14:16

When I scroll down, I don't see that red button here in the footer. And let me show you what I added here in the design settings to achieve that. So I added, just a small snippet of CSS here, this load up. We did user session and this is that red button in the footer and we did display not. So when it's when the class is user session in the body, we know that it is a logged in person who is, visiting the site or, browsing the site.

14:43

General session is just somebody who's not logged in as a member. So you can start doing this for menu links, you know, images, buttons, things like that. It's going to I mean, it's CSS, so it's it's still on the source code, but you can visually hide things, with visibility or display none based on what your objectives are. Okay. And there's a ton of things coming soon.

15:05

We just cherry picked a few one here. More on the free stock photos. So we wanna make this available on the front end when you're creating blog posts, or, you know, event posts or coupon posts, things you're publishing to your site. This one is going to be an add on, but we're gonna extend the free stock photo access to the front end so that when you are creating things like blog posts, and when you marry this with the ChatCPT add on, you can quickly create content with ChatCPT. Right there, you can pull stock photo images to complement, the article, and you can whip stuff together pretty quickly.

15:41

Just because of the implications of this, you'll be able to give this to your members. You can pick and choose which membership plans or specific members can have access to the free stock photo library when they're creating post as well. It doesn't just have to be for the admin of the site, but that should be coming very soon. This next one we announced in the Facebook group, we're just gonna be tidying up the profile tabs. It's going to be a design setting for everyone, and I would recommend doing it.

16:07

What it's gonna do effectively is when there is an overflow of tabs on the member's profile page, currently, it stacks them, one underneath each other. So it kinda it's not the most attractive thing. It's not the worst thing in the world either, but there will be a design setting. You can go ahead and enable it once this setting is released, and it will just add these slider arrows here so that any overflow, can stay on the same row and line and users can simply, slide with the arrows. If you're on mobile, you can use the arrows or use your finger to slide left and right horizontally here as well.

16:43

And this next one is related to digital products. When your members purchase digital products, generally, you can set up an email they receive as a confirmation email or redirect them to a confirmation page. And usually after that initial purchase, they don't have direct access to those anymore. They can save them, somewhere locally on their computer. They can check their email again.

17:05

But what we're gonna do is when they're looking at their billing history on your site within their member dashboard, they're gonna have some links here to view the product page if it's still published, view the confirmation page that they were originally redirected to, if that's still published and active, and also, see a pop up of what that confirmation email was that they received. So the email template that you set for them to receive after purchase, they'll be able to see a copy of that as a pop up, right there in their admin dashboard. So, basically, after people purchase your digital products, they'll have some method to kind of remember what they purchased, go back to the product page, maybe they wanna repurchase it, and some other actions here as well. In addition to that, there are tons more updates coming down the line. I see a lot related to webhooks and the API.

17:56

So data portability and sharing your data between platforms is a bit more of that coming soon. Also speed, security, and quality of life features, making things, a bit easier and more intuitive for you guys. And a huge thank you to the Facebook group and the community. As we always say, a lot of these updates are from your suggestions and recommendations, and we hear you guys loud and clear. And we do appreciate your participation in helping to make the platform, a lot better.

18:24

So with that, guys, we'll swing on over to the tip of the week. And, David, if it's alright with you, I'll pass it over. Created some great slides and I think a great topic for everyone here, the power of image blocks to enhance both SEO and your users experience. Yeah, so quite a while ago we released, draggable content blocks to make it really easy to add pre made elements to some of your web pages to quickly and easily make a really visually appearing web page and experience for your users. So we'll be utilizing some of those, in this tip of the week, and how you can really improve your website's navigation, essentially, by utilizing them, in specific cases and specific areas on your website.

19:09

So, we'll show you some specific use cases, at the end here. But real quick before we get into those, just going over some general info real quick. So what are image blocks? Image blocks are essentially pieces of content, blocks of content that contain a prominent high quality image that then links the user to a related page on your website. So, you can kind of see a little bit in, the image to the right here.

19:36

The yellow, blue, and red circles, those would like represent the images that you could use. You can have three image blocks in a row linking to different pages on your website. So it really helps to make the user feel like they're clicking more into like a portal type of experience where you can really funnel them, down a navigational pathway rather than them kind of just browsing the website on their own, going through your main menu links, footer links, things like that. Generally, you'll probably want to use anywhere between three, maybe up to six blocks per row, And you can stack them as well so you can kind of have a table of these image blocks. And again, these image blocks, they'll, want to contain prominent and really high quality images.

20:18

You wanna make it visually appealing so it really grabs the user's attention, makes them actually wanna click into them, and, browse the rest of your website. And then along with the images, you can also add some short informational text if that would be necessary to to further explain to your users where exactly you're linking them to. So again, in the image on the right, you can see a little bit underneath those colored circles, which again represent the images. You might wanna have one or two lines of just short descriptive text with some more information. And then, probably also want to include like a button link.

20:54

So that they know they can either click the button link or the image itself to be directed to wherever it is you want to direct your users to. So, the benefits of utilizing this sort of navigation on your website with the image blocks, it does help to simplify the navigation experience for users. Again, they're not gonna have to go through all the menu links in your main menu, in your footer, depending on what web page they're on. Maybe you'll have some internal links throughout the page itself. This really helps to create more of that interactive experience with that click candy, making it visually appealing.

21:26

So, there's certain and multiple calls to action essentially is what these are. To direct users further into your website down a specific navigational pathway that you wanna send them. So doing this, by encouraging users to click more throughout your website, that can help to reduce your bounce rates. And going along with SEO, you'll also be internally linking to more pages on your website. So that also helps to signal to Google what your strongest web pages are on your website.

21:57

The pages that you're internally linking to most. And, we came up with a click candy term. I like it a lot. David, great work on that one. I think you trademarked that.

22:08

Yeah. You can kind of think of it like eye candy. So, some common placements for these image blocks. The homepage would be the most common use case. When people come to your homepage, you know, unless they're coming to you from a Google search or maybe from an ad that you have that's directing users to like a landing page.

22:29

They'll probably be coming to your home page first. So, directly on your home page, you might wanna utilize some of these image blocks to really make it clear what your strongest sections of the website are and where you want, users to go into. You can also use these blocks to link to categories for your various post types, as well as also your different member categories. How you utilize these will depend a lot on the type of website you have and what the ultimate goal and the purpose of your website is, your target audience, all that sort of stuff. But, you can utilize, these image blocks to bring more attention to like specific post categories or member categories that you wanna direct users to further explore.

23:12

You can also add these blocks onto like your search result pages. So, the post search result pages or your member search result pages. Again, if you want to highlight specific categories or maybe specific posts or specific members, you can do that by utilizing these image blocks. You can also utilize these for your pricing page or whatever page it is where you're listing your various membership options. This is a really common, use case when you have different membership plans offered to different types of members.

23:45

So, maybe if you have multiple membership plans for consumers and multiple membership plans for businesses, instead of listing all those membership plans on just one join page, which might make it a little bit confusing and convoluted for people who are coming to your website for the first time, you can kind of segment everything and make it more like a navigational pathway, kind of a funnel that you direct users to. So, first you can ask them if they're a consumer or a business. Through image blocks, they click on the corresponding one. And then that then directs them to another page that has all the membership plans for consumers or for businesses. And then from there, you can direct them to the actual checkout page or the join pages.

24:27

Another popular use case would be if you have a static landing page. So, maybe a static landing page that you build that you're directing traffic to maybe from Google Ads. You might wanna utilize image blocks on that landing page, again, to visually highlight and make it really clear to users exactly where you want to direct them to now that they're on your website. And, you can see a little example there on on the right. Basically, three image blocks per row, two rows, just directing users to different sections of, of the website.

25:01

Perfect. I think it's pretty self explanatory. One of the reasons we wanted to choose this for the tip of the week is we it's really powerful. It's really simple, and we see it's really underutilized by a lot of users or they just don't know exactly what they should put in those square blocks, when three things are in a row or four things are in a row. So we wanted to give you guys some ideas, and ways to get creative with this to improve the navigational experience for your users because really what as with the click candy, what it does is it makes it fun.

25:35

People wanna click on things that look interesting, things that make them feel like they're accomplishing something on their on your site. Right? Like small milestones and goals and wins. They they found out how to get to the events section of your site. Now they're looking at the events on your site.

25:51

So, again, there are many reasons why this is beneficial and then also the SEO benefit is because you're going to signal to Google what your strongest pages are and Google loves internal linking. And also because this is click candy, it helps reduce bounce rate because people are more inclined to quickly click on something that looks fun, friendly, or interesting, rather than leaving your site and that lower bounce rate is also a signal, to Google to help with your search engine ranking positions. So let's just look at a few simple examples here and then we can take some questions. Maybe we can help implement this on your site. But we do have a sample site here.

26:31

We didn't do anything fancy. We kept it super simple. But if we scroll down on the home page here, we used three here. This is probably the most common. A lot of people use the hero divider, that comes with brilliant directory.

26:44

So we created three links here, browse the network, become a member, and everything Boston. We just arbitrarily decided to show some Boston love today. What we did for everything Boston is actually quite interesting. So if we click on browse everything, again, the layouts of these can can be different. You know, the titles could be above the image.

27:05

Maybe you don't use a title. Maybe it's just images because the text is part of the image. A lot of people put their text in the image itself. But here what we've done is, you know, this site has news, deals, events about Boston. They even have job listings, you know, Boston photos, and you can also even add your content.

27:25

So in this case, they use the sixth part, to link to kind of like the join page or, you know, an opportunity to join the site. And this is really good because I mean, I mean, even if this was on the homepage, it would be fantastic. You know, you have the hero section and then this on the homepage. So instead of streaming all the recent events and all the recent deals, give people more of a portal experience. They come to the home page, and then they wanna go to the events section.

27:52

So let's click into the events section. We created something for the events. So now we're in events. Again, very simple what we've done here, and there's three categories of events. There's sporting events, music concerts, business conferences, and your site may have more categories, for events, or fewer categories.

28:13

But in this case, we've now given the user a win. They feel like they're entering a portal, and again, we're talking about that click candy. Some of these look interesting. We didn't link these, in this example, but we would we would link this to the sporting events category, the music concerts category, or the business conferences category. We we can link the image button or both.

28:36

And while we're here, let's just pause for a second since we're talking about categories related to posts, in this case, event posts, how you would get those links. We can go to our demo bootstrap site real quick. And actually let's go to our events demo here. If you're ever curious how to get a link to a search results page, the quickest thing to do is just conduct a search. So in this case, we'll search sport and we'll hit search and this would be the URL to get to your category.

29:06

In this case, the category is sport. And then in the text editor, we would go ahead and link the image, or the button. So let's log out of this, member we're logged in as, and let's go to the join page in this next next example. Our third home page call to action was become a member. So we'll click list your business.

29:27

And what we've done here is we kept this. This is what's normally here just by default plan one, two, or three. But But in this case, we did something a little different and I think we could probably choose even better images. But this site just has two membership plans, general users free to join and this would link to the free sign up page, or a pro user who can access and post content. I guess that's the perk in this case.

29:50

So very simple. It's $20 per month. And again, we can link both the image and the button to the checkout pages for these membership plans. The third thing we've done here is a little bit interesting for a third membership option is not a membership option as well. We're asking if people wanna advertise on the website.

30:09

So we said get your brand out there, banners, email blast, social posts. In this case, we did create a sample page for advertising options. So, from the join page, we're gonna click on advertise. And we said advertising opportunities, reach more Boston locals and tourists. And this website offers three ways to advertise.

30:32

They offer banner ad spots, sponsored email blasts, and paid social mentions. So again, we're using the image blocks here to easily display content for the user to digest and absorb. It uncomplicates things and it helps you, the website owner, potentially keep things organized as well as edit out maybe erroneous on offerings that just add clutter. So it kind of put some guardrails that we don't we don't want a hundred options here. I can certainly see nine options here.

31:03

But again, we want things to be within reason so that the user can digest and absorb what they're looking at. Now we didn't link any of these, but these could very easily link to a landing page that talks about all the banner ad spot options, pricings, timing, times that they can, have the banner ad spots, same for the email blast. So these these could easily link to more informational landing pages on these topics. And then one more thing, and then we'll show you how we created these, very quickly actually is, we did redesign the classifieds theme on the BD site, and we did implement image blocks as really the staple of the homepage sections of the classified theme. These are just using image blocks.

31:46

In this case, we did an asymmetrical layout. We did, 25%, twenty five %, and 50%. So there were basically four blocks here and we combined the last two columns to make, a longer one. So we created this image block section here. Also a single image block here.

32:06

So this is just for sporting goods category. And then two image blocks, these have descriptions underneath them. So we could see here that really utilizing image blocks, we don't have to be wildly amazing web designers or use anything fancy. We could just use simple text and high quality images, and we could just it could just be enough to give a good solid user experience and to encourage people to continue clicking deeper and deeper into our sites. We did create one more on this sample site, created a page called private.

32:40

And this is a this is a public page. It's just for the demo of the webinar, but we created a portal page if this was private, member's page, protected pages. So it requires members member login or sign up. So if anyone wanted to click on any of these, they would hit a paywall saying you need to sign in or you need to upgrade your plan. So we kind of tease people that this is what they can access when they're a member, videos and courses, news and updates, exclusive events, jobs, board, photo albums, member directory.

33:11

And you can see here we are using two rows in this case, and then images that correspond to the category. And, again, if someone clicked on one of these, this was just for demo purposes. We didn't go that far. But if they would they would hit a protected page and that would encourage them to sign up. But just for them to see this that this portal exists should peak their interest and maybe will encourage them to want to sign up.

33:34

And all this page is is that hero section with the title text and a background image and six images that are linked. So as absurdly simple as this looks, we do see that it is highly underutilized. So we wanted to draw some attention to it for you guys. And let's actually see how we've created some of these pages. And what's even better is after you create one layout, you can always clone your web page and just create an alternate page, that focuses on something else.

34:01

So if I'll scroll down here and we can see the advertising opportunities page, And then we'll recreate one of these together. So this was the title, advertising opportunities, reach more Boston locals and tourists. And all we did was utilize the content blocks here. We used the, three column feature list. I'll drop one up here.

34:22

And what we did is we just, changed title one, title two, and title three. And of course, you can you can remove the text. If you feel that it's not necessary, you can keep it if you're gonna add some value. And then for the images, really, I just used the Pexels, update, and I just chose images of people on a laptop or you can search for, you know, singer. And then also what's helpful is you can search for the same orientation.

34:52

So if we select square for a lot of these, I'll just do that. We can just choose some of these here. Let's do it together. So there's one square image and let's do three of them. So we'll do this one.

35:04

Let's say this is dance, and we'll do square. Square dance. Alright. So we'll do dance here. Let's see.

35:12

This is a cool one. Alright. And let's do the last one. Let's do ballet. Okay.

35:19

Sure. This one's fine. And we'll save it. So now we've created this section here. What's cool when they're square images is if you apply, the style of circle because it's an image, it gets converted into a perfect circle.

35:34

So that's a nice touch you can do. And then also if you're going to link the image, which you certainly can add a URL for that, you can also choose to enlarge on hover or shrink on hover. It gives a little bit of a effect there. Again, makes the site feel a little bit more developed. Nothing fancy, but just a little bit more control for you guys there so you can enlarge on on hover.

35:56

And what's even better is if you have the I think the premium content blocks add on and unlocks a wealth of other layouts and stuff. So if you have a ton of, features you wanna do, again, you can just swap these out, the images that come. So this is a 4 x 2 layout, and we can, look for animal. Just do one more time here and bring that in. So again, you can just kind of, modify.

36:23

You can look through here and find things you like. What I like is actually I think the teams layouts are the best for a lot of things. These this can certainly be like categories to search. Don't just switch it from being teams to just being like member categories or post categories or something else, and you can easily change the focus of this. It doesn't have to be for searching people.

36:45

It can be for categories or posts on your site. This one is also a great one here. And again, it doesn't have to be for people. You can just swap it out for, whatever purpose you wanna do it for. Just look at the layout is what you should look at.

36:60

And really that's that's basically I don't want to get too much into it because it's pretty self explanatory here. And we did have one link here from a previous webinar. This one shows you how to turn search results pages. This has come up in the past in the Facebook group. How to turn search results pages into their own static pages like if you have a page for your Los Angeles members and you wanna add some custom content there, this video will show you how to do that to further enhance it, for SEO.

37:31

But also on these pages, you can add image blocks as well. So if you're on a Los Angeles, page for members, maybe then you wanna link to Los Angeles events, deals, and other post types that you might have, job listings. But instead of doing it as a tag cloud or plain text links, do it as image blocks and that click candy should get people's attention and encourage them, to want to explore your site a bit more. Think the key here is making it easy for the user and building their confidence to want to explore your site further. You know, there are advantages to a busy site that has a lot of clutter on it, you know, some that works for a lot of sites.

38:14

But for the most part, you know, simple clear navigation, again, encourages users to wanna use your site more than when things are complicated or cluttered or unclear. So we don't wanna belabor the point too much. We know it's it's pretty self explanatory. We just wanted to make a reminder, that you should and you have that at your disposal to use on your site, on your homepage, creating new pages, but really think having that portal mentality can really enhance the experience for a lot of users. So with that, hope you guys enjoy that tip of the week.

38:45

We'll take a pause now, and we'll pass things over to you guys. We can answer any questions you have on your site. Let's start with Rich here. There we go. How you doing, my man?

38:54

Great, man. Rich, how's how's it going? Good. Good. Hey.

38:59

Quick note and then a question tech question. But, by the way, the, candy is available for domain name, but it's about $12,000. This is a side note. Yeah. That is pretty clever, David.

39:14

It kinda self describes it. On the on the images or photos in the library, do you know approximately how many they are and how often they might be updated? Well, I think Pexels has about three three million images in their library. However, and spoiler alert, we're going to try to sync up with two other solutions as well to enhance our BD user search to include two other separate platforms libraries as well. So, right now we're just gonna nail it down with the the Pexels integration, but there are other two major integrations that we can utilize and we're gonna just try to make it part of one big library so our users can just search and get all the results, or at least choose between the libraries they wanna search.

39:57

Yeah. That's awesome. Because I was kinda playing around with it while you're talking and, found some great images. And some were kinda redundant, you know, and a little bit limited, but there's, you know, plenty to pick from. So it's a really cool feature option.

40:09

And I can definitely see the value for SEO and just the, create continuity through the site too. Because that's one of the challenges we have is we, you know, pull images from all different sources. Or is it it comes from one source that there's some, you know, uniform barrier. And then lastly, the kind of tech question is with the Twitter change to x, how do we change that on our site? You know, on our homepage, it still has the old, bird, you know, image, instead of the x icon.

40:41

Is that This is what And and also for our members and finally, you know, it's because it's two part. One from our home page, and then second, when our members, you know, add their social media, you know, we have, you know, LinkedIn, all those standard icons. But how do we change that for the member experience and for our also for our homepage? Gotcha. I'm a little torn.

41:02

I'm a little angry at them. Well, there's a lot of reasons. But the reason is this. You see these share buttons here? Yeah.

41:08

These are these are rendered from these are their iframes. It's rendered from them, and they still use the tweet button with the bird. Uh-huh. And we've been hesitant to switch up this link here. This is the one you're talking about and in the foot because we know it's x.

41:27

News channels are using it as x. We probably will do it very soon, but our concern was they haven't it seems like they're quasi using both. Right. Right. So, we were like, alright.

41:40

Let's wait for them to update their tweet button because that's rendered through their assets and their sources, but they have yet to do that. Nevertheless, let me show you one thing that you you can do. Well, you can edit this. This is a widget here. You could edit it and swap this out with, with the x image if you have the x icon that you wanna use.

42:02

Yeah. But I wasn't sure where to what source to and kinda change. Let me, let me see if I can help you real quick. Let's use chat g b t shell. Would that be okay?

42:15

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Alright. Let's go.

42:16

I think they were down a sec. They've been down up and down lately. Let's see if they're back. They're back. Okay.

42:23

Use jQuery to, let's do this together. This is always fun. I'll try to do it quickly since we're on the webinar. Let me just copy this here. Just going to swap out the icon of an image.

42:39

Swap out this with I'm gonna assume we have the image that someone's gonna do. Images forward slash, x icon dot p n g. And let's see what it also also make background black, of the ATEC. Alright. Let's see what it gives us.

43:02

This might be enough. You just have to upload the x icon to your site and replace this. So, this will handle it on the profile pages. If you don't wanna edit the widget, this will swap it out. But if you wanna ask it in the Facebook group, actually, that might be better.

43:16

Yeah. And then I can give you an appropriate answer Okay. Instead of instead of doing it on the fly here. Yeah. That's fair enough.

43:23

Yeah. Okay. Appreciate it. Alright. You're welcome, Rich.

43:26

Sorry, guys. I'm I'm addicted to, ChadCPT for this kind of stuff just because of the quickness that it can do it. Alright. Let's continue with the questions here. We'll go to Carmen.

43:36

How are you today? Good. I feel like a baby here going from your coding to this, but, I started a directory just recently, and I actually had somebody created for me, and I don't think they got very far. But one of the basic questions that I have is, dementiacaredirectory.com. When doing a search, they told me that there's no way to do a search within x miles of.

44:03

Is that correct, or do they just not know where to look? Yeah. Let me help you out with that. We do have, I think, one widget that you can pop in your sidebar. Let's do that together, and it might apply to the the I have all the premium all of the, add ons.

44:22

So Sure. Okay. Let me show you the widget that might help you out here in your sidebar. Let's go to sidebar manager, and let's do the member search results. Let's customize this one.

44:35

We're still on our test site here. And let me search for radius. I think we had one. Yeah. Search module, local radius search.

44:43

I'll share this with you. Let's see if this is what you're looking for or close to what you're looking for. So if we go to the member search results here, yeah, now we have a search by location, and then you can input I think it goes up to a hundred miles. So you can do a radius search, based on this. So what you can do here and let me help slim let me re recap what I've done is, for the member search results sidebar, so in the sidebar manager, the member search results, I searched for this widget.

45:17

I'll give you the name of it right now. Yeah. Yeah. I searched for radius. There were only two.

45:21

So, yeah, that should be able to support a location radius search. So let's do a test here, 90035, and let's search within five miles. And okay. So it's it's found some people that are within five miles of that. Okay.

45:39

So that should that's that's the basic radius search there for you. Perfect. Quickly, just while we're on this page, I also noticed that there's no addresses on this page. Is that something I could add on here too, or is there not there for a reason? You can you can add it.

45:56

I think, you wanted the full address. You would have to edit the yeah. You would have to edit the, the edit the post type for that. Let me see if I can help you with that real quick. Apparently, the person I hired off of, Upwork is not a brilliant directories expert like he claimed.

46:18

Yeah. I'd be wary of I mean, there's probably some really good people on Fiverr and Upwork, but people can make any claims they want themselves on there. So you might wanna see examples. Can't, unfortunately. Unfortunately.

46:30

So, let me just see here. Yeah. This one in the it just does the, the user city. So this is just some code. It checks if the user so, basically, what you wanna do is it's it's address one is the, or address is the, the variable name, user data address.

46:46

So let me just tell you what you would want to add here. Let's see if this works together. Let's just see if that works on this test site here if we get the address. No. That didn't work.

46:58

Let's see. Let's try address. I just need to know the variable name. I don't might not know it off the top of my head. Let me type address one.

47:05

That's it. Address one. So you can see here now we have Yes. Perfect. Yeah.

47:09

We have that there. I'm just doing again, I'm doing it quick and dirty here, but, this is the variable you'd wanna add, into the page loop of your search results page. If you wanna ask in the Facebook group, I'll be happy to follow-up on it and get that updated on your site for you. Perfect. Thank you so much.

47:28

You're welcome. Alright. Good question there from Carmen. And let's see. Terry wrote in a question.

47:35

Let's see here. I believe that some time ago, we had the option to have alternative text labels, for when the bookmarks feature was used. The bookmark text might say save to favorites. And then when a user clicks on this, the text change to saved. Am I correct, or am I imagining this?

47:53

I think you may be, correct there. Let's check the text labels together, for Terry, and what we'll do is go to settings, text labels. I could be incorrect as well. So fifty fifty one. Let's look for favorite.

48:10

This is a my favorites label. Let's look for bookmark. Okay. Okay. This is when there there's one when there's bookmark and one when there's counts.

48:19

Let's see. Something is tripping up the webinar toolbars here. Okay. Yeah. It looks like there's just one.

48:26

There's one when the when there's a, a plural, or there's account. So you might wanna play with these two, there, Terry, and see if those, those, change after a post is like when it's not liked and after it is like. Alright. I don't see any more hands up, which is perfectly fine. Guys, hope you enjoyed the webinar, the replay will be available in the Facebook group, and thank you David for putting these slides together.

48:58

We definitely encourage you to use image blocks throughout your site. It's the simplest tool you have at your disposal both for design, navigation, and to simplify the flow of your website for your users. Use them for all sorts of things. I'm just gonna recap, you know, linking to your different post types, creating private member portals, linking, to membership plan options, and so much more. And again, thank you guys for all your suggestions.

49:28

You definitely contribute to the lab updates that we push week after week. So thank you guys so much. The next webinar will be in two weeks. We look forward to seeing you there. The replay will be available in the Facebook group.

49:41

So if you we covered something a little too quickly, you can catch the recap there. And on behalf of myself, David, and the entire Brilliant Directories family, we love you guys so much. Thank you for your questions and joining us today. We look forward to seeing you in the next webinar. Have a brilliant day and a great week.

49:58

Take care.