Episode 12 - Matchstick Framework

The episode everyone has been waiting for! We've hinted at it and given a few sneak peeks in our previous episodes but a full episode on the Matchstick Framework is finally here. We discuss everything about the Framework in this episode. 

If you'd like a free demo of the Framework, reach out to us at hello@matchstickstudio.co

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
<silence> 

Speaker 2 (00:17):
And welcome back to the Match Matchstick Studio podcast. Jordan Carmen coming at you along alongside Chris Green. What's up everybody? Another episode going down. You can check us out online and on Instagram matchstick studio.co. It's the same on both. Just type it in match studio.co. You'll find us. We're search for Matchstick Studio. But I'm guessing if you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know about us, which is a good thing. Yeah. And hopefully, and you're sharing that, please do that. Absolutely. And hopefully, if you've already heard about us, you know about one of our greatest accomplishments, let's call it, I would call it that. I'd call it that our, our matchstick framework, as we call it, which is what we're talking about today. It is for all intents and purposes, A CMS, which is a content management system. It helps you manage your web content on the old internet. 

Speaker 2 (01:30):
And it's used on all of our websites. Correct. Jordan? Everything we do online with Webb is run by the framework. And you built that with your hands. Bare hands did a lot of sweat. What kind of bear went in? <laugh>? Big ones. <laugh> went into a lot of sweat, went into the framework, myself and Tom doing all of the development on it. Austin. Designing. Yeah. Designing it. Um, and of course, we get input from everybody. Uh, Chris, your yourself, and Kate uses it quite a bit for putting in content when she's doing, uh, new blogs and things like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, so it gets, it gets a lot of use. And we have sites, you know, we talked last week about modular. Those are, those are some of our smaller sites, uh, for small businesses. But so it runs those that it also runs our larger sites. 

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Um, yeah, it can handle a lot. It's pretty scalable. But today I want to really get into, we've been teasing it for a while. We've been talking about how much we hate WordPress. We hate Squarespace, Wix, whatever. Although they have their place. We've mentioned that too before. They have their place a very small Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> place. But the framework is our solution, if you will, to all of the issues and, um, just problems that people have managing their website or their content online. 'cause they can do more than just a website. We might get into that Oh, oh, a little bit later. A little bit of a feature. <laugh>. I do wanna say one thing though, for some people, someone who's listening who might be like, oh, well, they built it. Did they build it from the ground up? Did they buy the, like, buy it prepackaged? 

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Or is this open source from somewhere? You know, how, how did it start off? Like, what, I guess what made you think, and then, you know, why, why build something yourself when there's so many others? That is a great question. Lots of reasons. Lots of, lots of things that caused us to get into building our own platform, if you will. CMS framework. Um, let me just go through a, but maybe I'll just rattle 'em off in in Okay. Whatever piques your interest. I'll dive into it. We can get into, yeah. So two, two camps. Client, a client camp, and an internal camp to us. So a number one, we were noticing a lot of frustration from clients in previous jobs that we had been in doing the, doing a similar line of work. Yeah. We noticed a lot of client frustrations when using these other tools, whether that's WordPress, at the time, Squarespace wasn't as prevalent. 

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Um, but a lot of it was WordPress. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You have some other ones like Drupal, uh, and a and a handful of others that they would get really, clients would get really frustrated because of, there's a learning curve to those. There's a whole backend, you might accidentally hit a button and everything's different now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you might get an update that you didn't know about, and everything's different now, or the whole site's down. You might get script attacked. Yeah. And now there's pornography on your website. A lot of, a lot of things go wrong. Yeah. So there's, there's the client aspect of it, just trying to solve their issues. Because the fact of the matter is, most people, most businesses need a way to quickly and easily edit their text, images, links, you know, events, forms, blogs, et cetera. They just need that to be quick and easy. 

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Because if you're on WordPress and you don't sign in every, but every couple of months, then you forget how to use it. And it's gonna take you three, four hours to re-figure out how to add a blog post. Yeah. Or to how, how to change a page that now it doesn't look like something completely different. So there was a lot of frustrations on the other side. In our camp internally, we didn't like those frustrations either, because that means that we are not able to help as many people. Yeah. Because we have to focus on one client or customer that is needing our attention at that point. And that unfortunately drives up their costs. Yeah. So in an effort for us to drive down costs, to have maybe more control over the design, the aesthetics, that was another frustration of ours, because WordPress is so theme driven and plugin driven and all this other stuff, you can install a plugin or, or a new theme doesn't, and it didn't matter. 

Speaker 2 (06:52):
We could work on a, on a large website Yeah. For two to three months, launch it, and the next day it could look completely different because they could just go install a new theme. Yeah. So that's not what we worked hard to do for them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And maybe they did it on intentionally or not. It, it really doesn't matter. That's not what the intention of the site Yeah. Was. And so now it's a, it's a, you're just driving up costs for everybody. Yeah. So that's kind of the, that's kind of the basis of it. So the good thing is though, is from all that, from all these client frustrations, from y'all's frustrations, it sounds like, you know, from the framework perspective in putting that in place, it makes it so, well, first of all, you got, we're in control of it. So from a standpoint of, you know, a client having an issue, it's a lot easier to solve that issue knowing how it's built. 

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah. Rather than, you know, having to be like, well, this is actually a WordPress plugin, so I can't even go to WordPress for this. I've gotta go to whoever the plugin who built the plugin for it. Yeah. Trying to figure out what's going on on there. I mean, this from a time standpoint on like from, you know, help desk type solutions, it seems like it's a, it's a big time saver and Absolutely. It saves a lot on that. And that was one of your questions, right? Did we, how did we create it? Yeah. It's from scratch. Yeah. I mean, it's starting from the ground up. Absolutely. Literally, man, <laugh>, it's from a single idea, a single text file. The first iteration of the framework probably should have saved it for posterity's sake, but 'cause it was rough. It'd be, would it be something like, you look back on now <laugh> and you just kind of laugh and be like, why did I do this? 

Speaker 2 (08:48):
It would be cool to go back and, and have like all of the different versions. Yeah. At least the major versions, you know, sort of side by side. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or be able to use kinda like a time machine, you know, put it in a museum. Yeah. Where version, not even version one, just the, the initial idea. All you could do was change text. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it put all these crappy little text edit buttons next to the pieces of text that we set up to be able to do that. It was very strange. Yeah. But it proved the concept. <laugh> proof of concept is important in technology. So Yeah. And we actually did it with our website. That was the first, that was the first website. The first website we did it with was our own website, just so we could update some text because we had the same problems. 

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah. And we weren't, we'd already decided we weren't gonna use WordPress. So we started out with a static site, which is a whole other thing. If you don't have a CM at all, you'd have to, you'd have to, like, as a developer, you'd have to be the one that goes in to change everything. Yeah. It wouldn't be so Exactly. Which you need to be developing and updating the framework. You don't have time to be updating all these websites, man. That's right. <laugh>. So we set it up for our own purposes, just so we could edit some text if we needed to edit some text. That was it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you'd sign into it, it did nothing else. You'd sign in and there was nothing but these little edit buttons next to some text <laugh>. So, but it proved the concept. It was very useful. 

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah. I think we did it on, we offered it to a couple other people. We did it on a couple of other sites, very basic. So then we said, Hey, let's run with this thing. Yeah. Built it out a little bit more. The next iteration. You could do images now. Ooh. Yeah. What year was this? Oh, I, well, it sounds like, the way I'm describing it, it sounds like it's the early nineties <laugh>, but <laugh> it was probably 2015. Yeah. Uh, but that's a good thing. I mean, just for me personally, knowing 2015 where it was and seeing it now in five years, man, that's crazy growth. Yeah. I remember these. Not only that, but you guys have had other things you have to work on. So, you know, while the framework does take up a good portion of your time, it's not a hundred percent of your time. 

Speaker 2 (11:17):
So, you know, it's one of those things like you've have managed that time well and been able to, to build something unique to us, um, yeah. To kind of help build what we are today. So Yeah. Very well said. I remember the, that second iteration, I wouldn't, it was not even version one yet. I spent probably 180 hours over two and a half weeks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, something like that during Christmas to get that going. Uh, it was like Christmas of 2015 to get that going. And so we, we stood that up and said, now you can edit text and images. It was the same sort of simple setup where you just had a little edit button that would, that would show. It was just always there. So you'd sign into it, it would just always be there. And it looked terrible because A, we didn't put any design into it at this point. 

Speaker 2 (12:13):
It was just kind of like, I was like, I don't wanna spend my time on that <laugh>. We were like, let's just try, let's just try it and see if it'll work. Yeah. And so, again, that helped. I think we gave that to a couple other people and really helped them out. And so from there, that's when we said, okay, let's do this for real. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then we spent probably the next three to four months creating version, what I'll call version one. Wow. Um, so Austin and I got together, said, these are all the things that we would love to be able to do. And, and we actually created a, you know, and designed all the, all the as aspects of it. So you could have, now you could have user different users and being able to sign in, and now you can create new pages. 

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Now you can create new blog posts, et cetera. You can, the, the, all those little silly little edit buttons went away to now you have a, an outline around things that you can edit when you hover over it. Um, so it just became a lot more user friendly. And we ran with version one Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for at least, at least two years probably. So as we built our business and just got more people Yeah. More people in on it. And, and it kind of became this a little bit of a snowball effect because more and more people, we, we, and the effect grows as more and more people are getting off of WordPress. They want, they want something that's easier. Yeah. So we're bringing them, bringing them in. Well, the good thing is, is with the framework, you know, it, it's still tar like, like WordPress or Wix or whatever it is, it's still targeting those small businesses with those people who maybe can't pay for a full custom to have their own full custom done and have, you know, I would guess that, I'm sure most full customs probably would even to an extent have their own CMS built into on, on that. 

Speaker 2 (14:14):
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but Yeah. I mean, well we, and we sort of created the framework to be able to handle all of it. Yeah. So we're doing, yeah. We're doing modulars, which is its own product Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> built on top of the framework. Yeah. And then all of our full customs run on the framework as well. We even have some setups that are just, just like a headless CMS Yeah. Which we can do also with it. So now it's pretty powerful. But we're skipping ahead. Uh oh. I don't mean to jump, I don't mean to jump, because the next big iteration was we went from, we were in version one. It was still very much a hands-on process. Yeah. Where, and I mean that from our perspective, where if we had a new version, we would have to then go upgrade every single site by hand. 

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Meaning we're uploading files to all these different places to get, to get this to run. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so it was very time intensive keeping that going. So then we decided at one point, I think probably 2018, early 2018, we're gonna, we're gonna make, we're going for V two V two baby. So, and what we did with version two from the very beginning, which what what's crazy is version two is a, is completely from scratch. Again, I don't think we used anything <laugh> from version one just scrapped it all. Yeah. Other than the basic ideas Yeah. The foundation of what it's supposed to do. We didn't keep any of the code, any of the designs. Yeah. We redid absolutely everything and and made it scalable. Yeah. That was really important to us is to like actually be able to scale this thing, release updates in a more automated fashion. 

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Although today, as an offering, we, we do check all the websites when we upgrade them, we're still upgrading them and getting our eyes on 'em. Make sure nothing's broken. Yeah. But now anybody can do it, which is nice. <laugh>. So definitely, uh, it's, we don't have to be uploading files left and right Yeah. To try to do stuff. And it's just a click of a button, which click of a button just shows right up. You gotta update. Yeah. It's just like using your phone almost. You know, when you have an update, pop up and just click that and done deal, click the update, it'll tell you what's new, and now you got some new stuff. Yeah. And the great thing about it, it, that button doesn't show up unless you have an update. So it's not like something that's just there. Yeah. And that's another important aspect. 

Speaker 2 (16:59):
We, we don't clutter your views Yeah. With things that you don't need, you know, and we try to build everything in that you do need. Another irritation with WordPress is WordPress itself doesn't really do that much. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have to have so many different plugins that you put into it Yeah. To make it do what you want. Yeah. And even then you can install a theme, which will get you a blog, basically. Maybe some pages. But you, if you need SEO well you gotta go get a plugin for that. If you need a contact form. Yeah. Well, you gotta go get a plugin for that. You know, all these things. And you name it, you want, uh, you want social media? Go get a con, go get a plugin. <laugh>. Like, just nothing's actually built in. No. I mean, they, and they just, that's, that's not their intention. 

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. It, it, I should be clear too, that WordPress is still, WordPress was started in 1999, I think it's original inception. So they've been around a lot longer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I think the current, even the current versions that they're on, there's still code in there from the early two thousands. Yeah. They're still built on this early web, early.com technology. It's just grown and grown and people have co-opted it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to do things like be a CMS for a business, which it was never meant to do. It was a blogging platform. Still is at its core. Mm-Hmm. Is a blogging platform meant for people you remember, uh, Zenga or Live Journal, bro, that, or literally Zenga. I was, I was just thinking Zenga is the first thing I was trying to go back to of like my early internet. I wouldn't call Zenga social media, but it would be very first time for, for me, that's all of my friends had Zenga. 

Speaker 2 (18:57):
And that's what we all used to like when you were at home. Yeah. It was Aim and Zenga. Those were like the two things that everyone used. Yeah. So I'm sure if I went back and found my old Zinga, there'd be some really embarrassing things. <laugh>, there'd be a lot of emo thoughts over there. Yeah. I think I had like a red and black theme and it was just Oh, nice. I most likely had some metal on there too. Did you have any like, uh, sprites or snowflakes or No. Something falling down on the screen? No. The thing that comes back floating around, the thing that comes back to me the most is, at the time I was in eighth grade, so of course I had a very serious eighth grade relationship. And I'm sure you know, of course, all eighth grade relationships last and are meaningful. 

Speaker 2 (19:40):
And <laugh> you learn a lot from them. Um, but <laugh>, going back to it, is like, I'm sure I would've said something extremely stupid that you're like, you, like, you're just like, why would I say this? <laugh>? Yes. That's, which by the way, quick sidebar, we do not need to get into this, but that's the cycle of life. Yeah. People Okay. What, what children put on the internet probably should not live forever, but anyway. But it does, we digress. Thankfully, Zenga and MySpace have gone away, so I don't have to worry about ever seeing any of those again. We don't have, unfortunately we don't have the same luxury with Twitter. It's been out there long enough. Anyway, I would liken WordPress to Zenga and Squarespace to Geo Cities. Okay. Like, those are the precursors. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Which again, it seems crazy. Just talk like that because it's so far, it's so long ago. 

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah. Well, it's, yeah, it's been 20 years, less than 20 years since most of this, what years has even existed. But man, the internet moves fast. So it always seems like it takes, it's a lot longer than it is to, to me though, having something built on that old of technology, not having rebuilt it or revamped any of the code into it. Just to, well, first, the first thing that pops to mind is security, which we all know right now WordPress is not great at to begin with. Yeah. But then the second thing is just like, nothing's gonna be optimized. Like, how can you optimize? And again, I'm not a developer, so I don't know if this is even possible, but how can you optimize that code to work as well today with the browsers that we have, people aren't using IE one or whatever was back then. 

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yeah. You know, it, it just kind of baff baffles my mind. There might be one that's out there. You never know. That's true. I mean, people still pay their a OL Bills <laugh>. So, but I'm still, I saved up, uh, 500 disks <laugh>, so I'm still using free try. Nice, nice. I'm surprised you still have a dis truck <laugh>. Well, you had to, I had to buy that in the black market. Oh, <laugh>. But, so, and that's another good point to bring up. 'cause we will probably always, you know, from the initial idea, we scrapped it and rebuilt it. And then from version one to version two, we scrapped it and rebuilt it. And we'll probably continue that cycle once, version two. I think now we're on 2.1 0.8, uh, just launched today, out today or a week ago, if you're listening to this. Yeah, that's true when this launches. 

Speaker 2 (22:10):
But 4 21, uh, if you once two point, you know, version two outlives, its lifecycle, we will probably just rebuild the thing. Yeah. With whatever technology is up at the time. And, and we've been, I don't wanna, I did wanna mention, 'cause I don't wanna go too far without saying this, but the reason why we built it from scratch and not from existing technology is exact. I think you mentioned it, but that's exactly the reason. So we could control it because if you get a, an update from WordPress and it breaks your site, that's not fun for anybody. Yeah. So we, if you're in the Magic Studio umbrella, we know what new features are coming, what bug fixes are coming, what all these things. And we take every website into consideration and can adjust and make the necessary updates that we need to make, if any, for a new version. 

Speaker 2 (23:16):
So everybody, people that have been with us since the beginning, they have, I mean, their websites have just gotten better and better and better and better and better. And we're just gonna continue to do that Yeah. Through all these framework updates. Yeah. I think one of the things too, to think of as like, as a customer experience, right? When you're going through and you're able to actually do things, you know, that, that in other cases, if you went with another or whatever they, you know, you might not be able to edit depending on what, what CMS you're using or you might not know how. And so being able to, from a customer experience standpoint, being able to like go through, be able to easily edit text easily, change images, easily, create a new page if you wanted to create a new blog post, whatever it is you want to do, being able to easily do that overall is just a huge impact. 

Speaker 2 (24:11):
And I think that's why, you know, most of the customers that we have that use use the framework. Love it. They, it's the easiest thing they've ever used. We get that all the time when people are switching over from WordPress, from Wix, whatever it might be, that they, you know, it's from a standpoint of how difficult is it to adjust? Not difficult. It's extremely simple. So Yeah. And everything we, they're gonna save a lot of time. Yeah. And everything we do here, you know, we always take into consideration too, how is it gonna impact the customer experience? And that goes from branding project that goes to modular projects. You know, we want to make, you know, our main focus is making sure all of our customers are taken care of. And I think that goes to say too, just with building the framework that was, you know, the number one consideration. 

Speaker 2 (24:55):
'cause I know the last thing, the thing that I would hate to always have to say is, well, this isn't our fault. You know that because I'm the one who ended up, you know, we, we got you into this, but now I can't fix it. So, you know, in my opinion, I, that would be my fault. You know? Yeah. I shouldn't have put you into something I couldn't take care of. The thing that I hate the most that other companies or other developers say to people and which ruins their experience Yeah. Is Oh, that can't be done. Just that blanket statement. It's impossible. Oh yeah. Because that means when somebody says something like that, if you're on a WordPress site and a developer tells you that Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it means one of two things. Either A, they don't want to do it, or b, they don't know how to do it. 

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah. But it does not mean that it's not doable. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, everything is, I mean, it's 2020 guys. Yeah. Everything, anything is possible. Everything is possible. As long as you got money and time <laugh>. Well that helps too. Yeah. And right now you wanna create warp. You wanna create warp drive. It's possible. I truly believe that. <laugh>. But how long do you have and how much money do you have? <laugh>, Elon Musk, we're talking to you. Yeah. Come on the podcast. Yeah, there you go. But I do wanna hit on this too though, because this your own framework, your own built framework is, is not something I think most companies have. Like most people who are in our industry probably don't have anything like this. And so, no. You know, in order to, I think it, not only does it separate us, one because we obviously wanna do the right thing and, and do the right thing for all of our customers, but also having that unique product or that unique creation that we've built this, you're not gonna find this anywhere else. 

Speaker 2 (26:41):
You've gotta come to us for it. And it's one of those things that I think overall it is extremely impactful from a business standpoint. 'cause now, you know, this is just, this is a driver. This is what we have people coming to us every day, it seems like now, which is crazy to think with the quarantine and how everything's gone on. I feel like we've gotten more contact about the framework or modular projects or different things, you know, which well, now's the time, which is great. Yeah. Now's the time. And I, and I, I want to hit on that, what you just said a couple of minutes ago, because to me, it's amazing if you're a business owner out there, you want somebody that sort of has your back. Yeah. Because if you are a, you know, you're an accountant or you're a chef and you own a restaurant or whatever your business is, you probably don't know a whole lot about the web. 

Speaker 2 (27:40):
You want somebody that has your back and that is looking out for your best interest, which is what we do with the framework. We are able to say, you know, when we're planning for new features, we're able to say what's on the horizon? What are people gonna need? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and or what, what do our clients want now? Yeah. And let's get those into new features. I mean, I can't tell you the number of times that we've, we've taken feedback, which is another great thing if you're a business owner and you say, you know, what would be great is if I could do this Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with, with, with my website or within the framework. And we say, you know what? That would be a great idea, <laugh>, let's put that on the list and we will get to work on it. And, and you'll have it. 

Speaker 2 (28:27):
I think it's important to say that, you know, we're not gonna sit here and act like we have all the answers either. So that type of feedback is a hundred percent necessary. Yeah. You know, people who are using it every day. What makes it, what would make it easier for you? You know, of course we have to take, there's a lot of things to take into consideration and all that, but for the most part, having you have access to tell the people who built this, Hey, this is gonna, to me, this would make sense. And then, you know, we can evaluate and say, actually, yeah, you know, we think this would be good. Or, um, no, I don't think that would fit in, but we have another solution that might help. You know, I think the one thing that I found at least here, and like you said, obviously we never say we can't do it. 

Speaker 2 (29:09):
Um, but I think finding, like finding the sol, finding a solution for someone, while it might not be the direct question that they asked, or maybe the direct solution to what they asked for, at least giving them an option is the most important thing. I mean, it's a working relationship and that's, you know, I think that's just part of being a client here. Like, you know, you, you know, we're not gonna just say, no, it can't be done. It's gonna be either A, yeah, we can get it done, here's what it looks like, or B you know, while this necessarily can't be directly done, we can have, we have these options for you. Yeah. For sure. And, you know, you choose from those. I just like, 'cause we have other software or things that we use to run our business as well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, I, and I always, like, one of our core tenants is I like the experts to do their jobs. 

Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah. I want, you know, we're not experts in accounting. Yep. <laugh>. So we don't do, we don't do accounting. You know, we let accountants do accounting. Yep. And we have software that we use, and I expect them to anticipate our needs and I expect them to listen to our feedback. If there is something that I think would be helpful to us, I would like to let them know and like to know that that is being considered as a new feature or option or something like that. So we take the same approach with people's web stuff and things are constantly changing. That's, that's what's hard about it. Or not hard, but that's, that's our challenge is, and you know, we mentioned how fast the internet moves. So tomorrow Google could come out and say, we no longer rank for this particular factor. It has to be this other thing now. 

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah. Just throw a total wrench. Yeah. Wrench actually. And so all of our clients may probably don't know Yeah. That, that happened. But that's stuff that we know that we take into account and we need to know that stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then we can put it in the framework and instantly solve it for, for the folks that are using it. Nice. That that doesn't, I just, that doesn't happen at WordPress again. Yeah. <laugh> and I, I talk like WordPress is a place, it's not a place, it's a, it's a thing that no <laugh>, nobody cares about. Yeah. <laugh> just the millions of people that use don't, probably don't even know that use. Probably not. But I do, I do want to say though, from just the past, like three iterations, the multiple different things that we've, we've, uh, you know, added, and I guess I don't want, I shouldn't say iterations, I should say versions from 0.6 to 0.8 now. 

Speaker 2 (31:50):
I mean, I would probably say at least three of the item, one item from each of those versions is something that a client has specifically Yeah. Requested. Um, and granted, I could, I'm sure I could probably go back and find something in 0.5, 0.4 and 0.3 as well, that would be something that maybe a client had suggested or asked for. But I think, you know, the most important thing in growing this is obviously taking into consideration what everyone's needs are. And like you said, we already look at all those and then we also take into consideration what they say. So yeah, I think it's on a good path. And, um, one of the, one of the great things about the framework will be that it's always changing. So Yeah, absolutely. You're always gonna get new features. And maybe we should quickly, well, first of all, let me just say the reason for that, I think the last four versions of the framework we've put out in, in the last five weeks Mm-Hmm. 

Speaker 2 (32:40):
<affirmative>. And that's not typical because usually we, we'd release a version, a new version, maybe every couple of months, every two to three months with a lot of stuff in it. But we realize and recognize with the Corona situation, Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that at least our idea was let's give our clients access to features a little bit quicker. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So instead of having one version that's got 30 features in it, you're gonna get four or five versions that have those same 30 features, but you're just gonna get 'em a little bit of, a little bit at a time. And you're right, the, the last five weeks or so, every one of those was from client suggestions. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I mean, we love that. 'cause it helps. Yeah. Especially now, it not only helps them, but it, it kind of helps everybody. Yeah. So, well, you and Tom have a long list of items that you <laugh> that are all future enhancements. 

Speaker 2 (33:43):
And so in order to keep adding to that list or you know, Mo hey, this is really important right now, you know? Yep. It's, it's cra I guess to me, constantly curating. Yeah. To me, a weekly update is insane for a web, you know, A CMS. So it, I, I don't know how you guys do it. I'm gonna, it's the benefit of being, uh, nimble, agile, nimble. So, but I do want to touch on, we've talked this whole time sort of about the origins and, and we said we wouldn't sit on that long <laugh> the benefits. Yeah. Are we gonna have to have a second? We will tee No, I'm just kidding. I wanna talk about what it can do. Brass tacks, let's get down to it. What you actually do. Here's what happens. If your website runs on our matchstick framework, first of all, there is no backend. 

Speaker 2 (34:41):
So you're not having to sign into something like WordPress or Squarespace and get loaded up with all these options. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you're like, I had, I don't know, I don't have a clue what 75% of this does, so I'm lost. There is no backend. Now, with there not being a backend, that means that on the front end, when you're not signed into it, it doesn't load any of that stuff WordPress does. That's why it's so slow. It loads everything, whether you're signed into it or not. It's got this whole loop that it has to go through and it checks everything. Those 50 plugins that you have, but only 10 of them are enabled. It's still checking all 50 of 'em. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, every time somebody goes to a new page, we don't do any of that. So it's blaze and fast. Now when you do sign into it, guess what? 

Speaker 2 (35:35):
It looks like your website, because it is your website. Yeah. The only thing different that you'll notice is the little menu bar in the top left corner. That's it. You wanna change something, hover over something, <laugh>. That's, that's all you have to do. Is that, is that accurate description? That's a hundred percent accurate. You wanna change something? I think from a ui hover over it. Edit it. Yeah. From a UIX standpoint, it couldn't be any easier. As long as you're somewhat familiar with how things work on the internet, I think you see a pencil, you automatically know that's an edit. Yeah. So, you know, you hover over it, it tells you, oh, edit this slide. Oh, edit this image or edit this text. You click on that and then from there, I mean, it's just point, it's click. Yep. All you do is just click around. 

Speaker 2 (36:24):
So edit your text directly on the page so you get that instant feedback. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's no back and forth looking at previews and all this other stuff while you're typing you, you can see exactly what it looks like. And the media browser dude is incredible <laugh>. So that was a big update. Yeah, I know. And just being a part of that and then also being able to use it consistently. And I think there have been multiple times now where it's like been, you know, I've had to change a photo and it's like, okay, I know I have this photo in the media browser. Let me just search up what the name of this was. And I just do like a generic search and boom, it's there and all I have to do is click. I don't have to worry about going through all my archives of photos now and finding this and uploading that image and, and all that. 

Speaker 2 (37:07):
And I know, you know, I don't, I think it's something that has to be enabled, but, you know, using tiny Fi to automatically compress all those is an option. Yeah. And I know we've hit on it in past, past, uh, podcast, but compressing all those photos has never been easier with a, with a framework. Yeah, absolutely. You want to create a new blog post, just sign in, drop down that menu, hit create, done deal, boom. That's it. You're done. You're creating published drops. You right on the page, you hit create, it drops you Right on the, the new page you just created. It's unpublished, but drops you right on the new page, create your post. Or maybe it's an ad landing page that you wanna do. Create that when you're ready, publish, done. It's, it's very simple. Very easy to use. And that's, you already get a, you get a training with that, you know, when you sign up. 

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah. And I think from that, I, there's been very few times where I feel like I've been asked from any of our modular clients, you know, how do I do this? How do I do this? And I just think, I think it's that easy. You learn it once. It is. And it's not something that you log in once and then three months later you log in the next time and it's gonna look, it's gonna look like something else. Yeah. So, which makes it so nice. And, and 'cause the core of it is, and if, if nobody remembers anything about the framework, <laugh> other than this, and this is what helps with the learning curve. The core of it is you sign in, find something you want to edit and you edit it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's it. That's all. If you can remember that, you'll never not be able to edit. 

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Something seems simple. I'll forget it though. <laugh> sign it. Now I should say there are a lot of advanced features built into it as well. We have integrations with all kinds of stuff. MailChimp, HubSpot, Google Analytics. Yeah. We have SEO monitoring. You can get alerts for your SEO So you know, it'll tell you, Hey, this picture is missing. Some alt text. You might wanna, you might wanna add that. Or this title should be between this, this amount of characters and this amount of characters if you really wanna show up well on Google. Yeah. So that's all built in. And we have the ability, depending on your needs to display or not display. Some of that, I mean, some of the super advanced features for the, for the super users. 'cause I think that's important too. It's, we want this to be accessible to as many people as possible. 

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I would venture to guess that about 90%. Just need that simple editing. We wanna solve that problem for businesses. If you're an accountant out there, if you're a lawyer, I just need to add a blog post or I just need to change my staff or update my office hours. Something like that. You can sign in. You can do that very, very, yeah. Very quickly. You're not losing time because you're on WordPress or Squarespace or something like that. It's very quick and easy. But if you're a super user, if you are that CMS guru, it works for you also. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We'll turn on all the advanced, we'll turn on every feature we have for you. <laugh>. You could be the power, the super admin. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Turn it on and you can go to town. Well, with that I'm gonna say thanks for listening to the Matchstick Studio podcast. Check us out again@matchstickstudio.co in your browser and on Instagram. Uh, you can get a link if you're on in your browser, you can get a link directly to the Matchstick framework page. Check out a little more about it. Hit us up if you want any more information. Thanks again. We'll see you down the road later, everybody.