WooCommerce Product Pages, Blocks, FSE and Customizations

Bob: Hey, BobWP here and with me today is my most prestigious co-host Anna. Anna, who do we have on the slate? Who is our special guest today?

Anna: Hello, Bob. Together with us, we have Jamie Marsland. He’s the founder of Pootlepress he’s playground for teaching WordPress courses and building WordPress plugins. Hello, Jamie. And welcome.

Jamie: Hi there. Thank you for having me on.

Baking a tart and a WordPress site

Anna: I found a video of you baking a tart and I have to admit, that’s when it hit me that I can’t wait to meet you. And also that was one of the various occasions when I was grateful for having watched a two minute video, advertisement video, and not regretting it. If you want to walk us through the process of how you did that, I would be really happy to know the story of it.

Jamie: This is the video on the front page of our website. Essentially, it’s a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for WordPress website. I get handed the instructions of trying to make a Bakewell tart. It’s a thing we have in England. It’s a very famous place that makes these cakes basically. And I got handed these instructions on how to make a Bakewell tart, and I genuinely didn’t know how to do it. Which is quite embarrassing actually because my grandfather was a baker. He had a bakery not far away from me. I get handed these instructions and I have the ingredients and then I have to go away and try and make a cake, and we videoed the whole thing and it’s genuinely done, honestly, me trying to make a cake with no recipe.

And the metaphor is like trying to make a website without understanding how to make a website without recipes and because we are a part training business, part plugin business, that was the metaphor that we used for the video. And it just follows me and my hopeless attempt to make a cake, which was hopeless, genuinely hopeless, but actually quite tasty. And yes, I ate it. Yeah, I’ll eat pretty much anything. I ate the cake and it looked terrible and I made lots of mistakes. If you’re a baker or any kind of cook, go and check it out, because I’m terrible. Especially when I do the blind baking, which isn’t baking blind, but you put like black beans into the pan, tray. And anyway, it gets technical and then I muck up everything. It looks terrible, but it actually tasted all right.

Anna: You made it look like a piece of pie. I think that’s a great thing.

Jamie: Yeah. I mean it looks okay.

The beginnings of Pootlepress, finding a niche in WordPress training

Anna: But tell us more about Pootlepress. What’s the story behind it? How did you come across the idea of building it?

Jamie: Yeah. A very quick story. I come from a corporate background. I started the business 10 years ago. I used to run a publishing company. I’ve always been in corporate life before Pootlepress. I ran a couple of publishing companies, both private and public, and then it was time to leave that existence. I’ve always wanted to start my own business. 10 years ago, I went off and climbed Kilimanjaro came back and then started Pootlepress. And we started purely as a training business, a WordPress training business. About 10 years ago, you are too young to remember Anna, but about 10 years ago, and in fact Bob knows this as well because you were training people back then as well Bob wouldn’t you, I guess.

Bob: Right, right. Yep.

Jamie: We were kind of doing the same thing. But in the UK, when you looked at the WordPress training market, the only people that were offering WordPress training were offering it for 500 pounds a day. And I kind of guess there was a market that didn’t want to pay 500 pounds a day for a day’s basic WordPress training to build a WordPress website. I took out a Google ad and I started a course or I wrote a course and then I took out a Google ad and my course was 95 pounds per person for a day’s course on how to learn WordPress. And within about four hours, I got my first order. I kind of discovered this market of people DIY-ers which we all know about now that didn’t want to pay 500. I mean, they were literally charging 500 pounds a day for these courses. And that’s where the business started. I started running group courses all around the UK, 10 people or 12 people in a room face to face. They bought their own laptops.

I traveled all around the country. I ended up doing them in Scotland, Wales, London, Manchester, all around the country doing about three or four of these a day. I’ve done a lot of miles over the years in terms of face to face training and trained about 5,000 people face to face, which is an incredible privilege in a way. And also you discover a lot about people. How people actually use WordPress. That’s how the business grew then about, I’m going to get my chronology completely wrong, but about five, six years ago, we started building plug-ins for a theme called WooThemes Canvas. Bob, can you remember when that was around? I think I’ve got my time skills about right.

Bob: I think so.

It started with the Canvas theme from WooThemes

Jamie: Yeah. And then Canvas came out a bit after that. Oh God, I can’t even remember last week, we’re probably wrong. But we started building plugins for WooThemes Canvas, which was kind of one of the first multipurpose themes. Back then you had, I think you had Canvas, you had Genesis and then you had Divi. They were kind of the leading lights and if this is going right back to the start of the real sort of theme explosion, and we built a few plugins for WooThemes Canvas, we built this little menu customizer plugin and a few other cool ones. And we grew the the plugin business off of that. Then we became a part training business and a part plug-in business.

And then recently, since Gutenberg actually came into being, we’ve been building plug-ins for Gutenberg primarily and primarily recently around WooCommerce and Gutenberg. If you look at our business now from a revenue point of view, we’re probably 70% plugin revenue, 30% training. Still do the training and love the training, but it’s much less part of my world than it was. Although I’m kind of going back to that in some ways, because I’m been leaning into YouTube a lot over the last eight months and loving it. That’s kind of a quick snapshot of the business, I guess. Yeah.

Anna: Thank you. That’s beautiful.

The pivotal moments of a decade in business

Bob: I’m going to steal one from Anna. What do you think were the kind of the pivotal moments in these 10 years? Because I’ve been kind of alongside you in one way or another for quite a while, and you’ve done a a lot of stuff in the Woo space, but if you picked out one or two, what were they the most pivotal you think for your business and for WooCommerce?

Jamie: Well, from a business point of view it was finding this market of people that wanted WordPress training that didn’t want to pay 500 pounds a day. That was a real eureka moment because a lot of stuff leads from that. Once you realize there’s this market of people that want to DIY it themselves. We did have agencies actually coming on the courses as well that wanted to grow that move into WordPress. But primarily it was people that were running their own businesses or organizations that didn’t want to spend lots of money with agencies or were spending lots of money on little tweaks that they didn’t want to continue spending money on. Discovering that market was a huge moment and then really discovering WooThemes Canvas and WooThemes obviously got bought out by Automattic.

Discovering Canvas and leveraging off that to build plugins around that. And sort of discovering the guys in Automattic as well. Because we were in the Canvas space, the WooThemes Canvas space, it was a natural lead to go into WooCommerce because that’s when WooThemes really exploded as well. It was so quick when they released WooCommerce. The growth of that was so astonishing and you could tell straight away, it was like a month. You could see the downloads happening, how big that was going to be. And I think from a plug-in business revenue point of view, it was kind of the decision to focus on eCommerce because obviously people that are building eCommerce stores are more prepared in my experience to spend money on plug-ins than just pretty designs. That’s where we’ve been fishing for the last few years and that’s definitely played out correctly.

Narrowing it down to training or plugin development

Anna: Have you ever had the intention of focusing on just one of the two lines of business or have you ever had a reason?

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a good question. I honestly, I love training so much that I can’t ever see that going in a way and they kind of feed into each other and it fits my background in terms of I left corporate life, a pretty well paid job, because I wanted to do interesting profitable work where I could decide the direction of the business. It’s been a very personal business plan. It probably wouldn’t be the traditional business plan. The things that motivate this business are not potentially things that you would take it in the direction if you were running it as a larger corporate business. I’m doing this stuff, because I love to do it in a way. Which it sounds a bit privileged, but that’s why we took partly why we took the Gutenberg decision, because I was just genuinely interested in and I could predict where Gutenberg was going to go and it was interesting work. What I’m trying to say is I enjoyed both bits so much. I wouldn’t really want to let either one go.

Bob: I can really relate to that because I don’t think I could be in any standard business model because I like to pivot. I like to… people know me from the last decade or more and it is all personal for me and I’ve kept it small for that reason and stuff and some people choose differently and that’s cool. But I can totally relate to what you’re saying.

Jamie: And we’ve had a few acquisition advances over the past year and it’s great. And I’m not going to say that will never happen. But part of the thinking on those discussions is I just can’t see myself fitting very nicely back into corporate life. When I travel on the train and I see people commuting and they’re working on these terrible 50 page PowerPoint presentations, it just sends a cold shiver of hell down my spine. And I’ve kind of been that. I’ve managed people for a lot of my adult life and I don’t really want to sit there and listen to people crying in front of me anymore. I’ve done too much of that.

Anna: You don’t have to do that. No.

Jamie: That sounds like I was a really bad boss, but when you’re doing reviews on people and they start crying. I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure I can do that anymore in my life. I was a very good boss so I don’t want to leave the impression of that. I’m not sure I want to do that stuff. I really love not having people’s problems. That sounds terrible.

Anna: Okay. Then tell us more about the team that helps you build these plugins. How did you make that happen? Do you still do code? Yes?

Jamie: No, no, no. It’s all outsourced. And I’ve been working with my lead developer for five years now, and then we outsource. There’s two main people and then we outsource, we have a flexing team when we need to. It’s very, very small and that’s how it works, really. But with the block editor, it’s been fun to meet and work with other people as well. My network’s pretty strong now.

A look at the new Pootlepress WooCommerce plugins

Anna: Tell us more about that. How does that work for you? Tell us more about your plugins in the sense that I see also on your homepage that you have at least six big storefront plugins that you actively work on and they seem like the closest to what WooCommerce needs right now to bridge this gap between what the themes can provide. And also when some customer needs may be. Tell us more about that.

Woo Builder Blocks

Jamie: Yeah, so we have a number of different plugins. We have one called Woo Builder blocks, which has actually been… It’s about two years old now. Right at the start of Gutenberg we started building that. That might be a bit wrong actually, but about a year and a half years old. And that lets you customize the WooCommerce product page using Gutenberg. We were kind of right out the blocks and that’s going great guns. And so we built a whole bunch of blocks, basically that let you recreate the single product page. Things like the product title block, the add cart block, short description block, tabs block. All the standard blocks that you need to rebuild your WooCommerce product page. Plus some additional blocks that let you add extra stuff to that product page. We’ve built some really cool stuff which not many people know about.

Split testing block

There’s a split testing block, which lets you split test different versions of the product. And then automatically pick the one that’s converting the best. We have a stock countdown block. We have a sales countdown block. We have a sticky add to cart block. You can have a sticky add to cart at the top of the page. We’ve built these additional blocks over and above what you’d need to construct the standard product page. And that lets you basically convert a normal eCommerce product into a Gutenberg product that you can edit using Gutenberg. And we’re just about to release a big version, which is two extra things which I sent Bob yesterday, a video of one of the things which is it will support full site editing. You’ll be able to use a full site editing theme.

Using blocks to customize the product page with full site editing

And in that theme you’ll be able to go into templates. And one of the templates there will be the single product template and you’ll be able to actually use Woo build a blocks to construct that single product template. And that’s now working as a preview and we’ll be rolling that out as soon as we fixed a few bugs that we’ve got with it. And then the second big thing that’s coming to Woo build a blocks is at the moment you just use, Woo build a blocks blocks to construct this single product page. But going forward, you’re going to be able to use those block on any pages. And for example, if you want to build a landing page, you’ll be able to use the product title block, but then choose what product that product title is dynamically being pulled in from.

And you’ll be able to add an add to cart blocking in that page and then choose the product which that add to cart block relates to. It’s pulling in dynamic data. You’ll be able to use Woo build a blocks outside of the single product page to construct things like landing pages and sales pages or a customized shop page, for example. That’s really cool as well. That’s Woo build a blocks. Then we’ve got another product called storefront blocks which has lots of fancy design layouts for your shop pages and category pages. We’ve got lots of like a masonry grid layout and a flip book layout, and a slider block that in there. But again, which is pulling content in from WooCommerce automatically. And again, the next step for that, we’ll make that play nicely with full site editing.

Block injector

You’ll be able to create templates, but have more fancy layouts for your WooCommerce store. And then we’ve just released just pre-Christmas a new plugin called block injector for WooCommerce, which lets you dynamically inject Gutenberg blocks anywhere within your site specifically within… we’ve kind of targeted that at WooCommerce. For example, if you want to dynamically inject a Gutenberg layout within the single product page, you can use block injectors to do that. You can basically inject it in specific places within WooCommerce. For example, your cart page or your checkout page or your my account page, but then you can also inject those layouts in specific locations within those pages. Which is really, really cool. And you see that functionality is available within a few other pro themes like Cadence and Blocksy, but this is kind of theme agnostic.

You can use it on anything, which is really cool. And then we’ve also just released with that, or just about to, the ability to target that on certain conditions. You can say, right, just target all products, but only products that have sold out and then just display this message dynamically on all those products. Or you can say, right, this Gutenberg layout, I want to inject this in this place on all products that are for sale. It’s really interesting and cool. And that’s called block injector for WooCommerce. Those are the kind of three newest Gutenberg WooCommerce plugins that we’ve built recently. We do have some other ones, but they’re the most shiny ones, I guess, because they’re the newest ones in really Gutenberg focused and they’ll be moving on to full site editing.

Deciding what plugin to build next

Anna: I’m so happy I described WordPress as a playground because it looks like you have a lot of fun building, nice stuff. I’m just curious, how do you decide what to build next? How do you make this decision?

Jamie: Really from the feedback from our customers and also the training. Again, that’s why the training leads into it and partly it’s stuff I want to build. That’s fun and interesting, but you don’t stray too far from what you come from and I have a fairly good hit rate in terms of knowing what people are going to be wanting to use and will pay for and what we are good at as well. And this year really, we won’t be releasing any new plugins. We’ll just be going deeper into the ones we’ve got. Primarily around Woo build a blocks and full site editing, storefront blocks and full site editing and block injector. Just adding more and more functionality into those. The core kind of plugins are set now for this year will just be going deeper and deeper into building out a functionality on them.

Growth among developers using block tools vs coding

Bob: Now I have a question that with everything all done said that you’re doing, our audience a lot of them are not the store owners, the users that is obviously a huge part of your customer base because they’re able to do all this stuff. Are you finding that developers the people that did more with code and they’re building sites for clients, are they starting to lean more towards things like your plugins that are, I guess you could kind of define as, no code in a sense because they’re just realizing why am I doing all this extra work when there’s all these great tools now out there? I just wonder what you see in that a space if you see some growth there.

Jamie: Yeah. I think that’s another interesting question. I think there’s a whole Gutenberg thing, right? Which a lot of the development community have been… Let me put it this way. A lot of the communities that I hang out in. I hang out in some good ones on Facebook and other places they have been and still are very resistant to Gutenberg. They’ll almost use anything. They’ll almost use anything they can get their hands on but Gutenberg. Whether that’s Oxygen and Bricks or Elementor, less so these days, but that’s also still getting enormous growth. But it’s really into interesting actually Bob, because I feel the same resistance to Gutenberg that I felt the same resistance to WordPress 11 years ago when I was running a publishing business. And we had a team of very expensive German developers who were great, by the way.

I’m not saying anything against them. They were fantastic. But I tried to bring WordPress into the business and it was exactly the same sort of slightly sneery attitude. We used atCMS which was .net CMS. It was about 5,000 bucks per site license. And obviously WordPress was free. And back then, the development community was incredibly sneery about WordPress. And I sense exactly the same resistance, exactly the same arguments being labeled against Gutenberg. And it is been like that for two years. And I completely understand those arguments and I get that there was frustration with the way it was implemented. But for me, it’s been obvious right from the start that this thing is going to be unstoppable and we’ll get there. Everyone’s going to get… Not everyone’s going to get there. But the momentum from Gutenberg. The arguments are almost forget the technical arguments. If Gutenberg can be twice as bad as it is today and it’s still going to win.

And the same with WordPress 10 years ago. It could be terrible today and it’s still going to win because of all the other factors that lean into Gutenberg and make it irresistible. The outside factors, the ecosystem, the money, the investment that’s going into it. It’s just so obvious that it’s going to dominate. And I see the same thing in the development community today with their opposition to Gutenberg that we saw… actually it’s probably 12 years ago. 12, 11 years ago with WordPress in the development community. I still see a lot of that in terms of lack of adoption with Gutenberg and resistance to Gutenberg. And obviously that plays into some of the stuff in terms of some of the obstacles and challenges that we have as well.

Jamie: I’ve been blamed for Gutenberg quite a lot of the time on some forums. People think I’ve written Gutenberg and they’ll lay into me for it. It’s an absolutely fascinating space we’re in. And a lot of the time I’m in dialogue with a lot of people that have objections to it. And I really enjoy those conversations, actually. I think it’s a really interesting and fun place to be because they’re all great people they’ve just got… And a lot of their problems with Gutenberg absolutely well founded, but it almost doesn’t matter in a way that stuff

Thanks to our Pod Friends Klaviyo & Wayflyer

Versatile block plugins easing the tension of using Gutenberg

Bob: Do you think the tools that you’re doing are going to make that transition a little easier or maybe convince them more that okay, I don’t need to do all this by hand there’s these tools that are now… when they get one over, I guess. Or could your tools actually be part of that winning over where they think, wow how much do I labor over creating this product page in WooCommerce, customize it, and now look what I have available to me.

Jamie: Yeah, I think so. Definitely. And actually some people are making the journey in the communities that I hang out in. They’re definitely making the journey. They’re still angry, but they’re on the road to start using Gutenberg. Yeah, absolutely. And actually the YouTube channel that I’ve kind of been going crazy on for the last six months has definitely helped some of those conversations as well. And those conversations often start very angry, not from me, but from the people that don’t like Gutenberg. But actually once you get into those conversations, they’re really good. And I’ve made some really good friendships with people that started out being really quite antagonistic with Gutenberg and I completely get it. I completely get their viewpoint. And I guess I’m just a bit more cynical about it doesn’t really matter. It’s going to dominate anyway. Jump on the train in a way. Which I think you’ve said as well, Bob, at some point, I remember reading you were kind of coming from that angle as well.

Bob: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve done that essentially since I’ve gotten into WordPress even way back when with all the changes and things, that was my attitude. And I think it was coming in from running a business outside of WordPress wasn’t corporate. It was a small marketing company. And I learned to be flexible in that marketing company. And once made that last for 17 years. And I thought, “Okay, I’m coming into this different community around this tool and I’m going to carry it on that way because that’s how it’s worked for me. And it always has worked for me”.

Jamie: I think the thing is a lot of people feel this deep sense of ownership and community around WordPress. Which honestly, I love it, but I don’t have that sense of that I’m part of it. I’ve always felt like it’s just me, not just me, but I’ve never felt like I have any input into it. But a lot of people do. And I think that’s that’s great. And I think that’s where a lot of their hurt has come from the way Gutenberg was implement on them, which is I get that. It becomes really personal. Yeah.

The future for WooCommerce builders in 2022

Anna: What’s your opinion on what the future holds for WooCommerce builders? What can they expect to see more of in 2022?

Jamie: Yeah, it’s going to be a big year. In fact, I just noticed today I was playing with 5.9 beater. WooCommerce 6.1 that there are, if you go into full site editing templates, there are now some templates ready. There is a categories template, a tags template, WooCommerce these are, WooCommerce tags template, a WooCommerce single product template. They’re definitely going to be starting to build some single product blocks, I’m guessing, which is going to have some impact on our Woo build a blocks plugin, which I’m quite excited about in some ways.

You’re going to see WooCommerce focusing on full site editing. The speed of that is going to be slow because of the speed of full site editing rollout and the number of full sight editing themes that are available. There’s going to be some really exciting opportunities for early adopters to get into full site editing and WooCommerce. And that’s where we want to be well placed. But there’s still going to be all the legacy stuff for a long, long time. So there’s that. I think there’s going to be a focus on full site editing themes in WooCommerce. We still haven’t seen many of those. That’s a really interesting space, which is surprising. I’ve seen some comments about storefront being… it’s still being developed and it’s still being quite highly developed as far as I can see, but there’s got to be in their view I would’ve thought a full site editing theme for WooCommerce.

That’s kind of exciting as well. Their focus is going to be very highly Gutenberg and very highly full site editing. Those two things for sure are going to be big in 2020, but I think the speed will be slower. The speed will be naturally quite slow as it has to be when they’ve got such… I was looking at the reviews of WooCommerce blocks today. If you go to WordPress.org, look at the reviews of WooCommerce blocks, which is their Gutenberg plugin which is separate to the core. It’s a bit like Gutenberg. It’s a few steps ahead of what goes into call WooCommerce, but the reviews on WooCommerce blocks are pretty critical, but it’s a great plugin.

It’s a great plugin. It’s incredibly robust when I’ve used it. And that’s the issue they have because they’ve got to be quite careful, I think in terms of how they roll stuff into call WooCommerce with Gutenberg, because when you’re dealing with an installation base of over 5 million sites, the support could be an absolute nightmare if you roll this stuff out. When A, Gutenberg’s still being developed full site editings really early. I think they’re very wise to move quite slowly into this space and only really start to execute stuff when the stands aren’t still shifting under their feet. I think we’ll see some exciting stuff, but it might be a bit more slow than perhaps we’d like.

Bob: Yeah, that’s spot on. Yep. Yep. I agree.

Jamie: And I think they’re right to do that. Absolutely right to do that. I think what their approach will definitely be that they’re going to do… You’ll be able to build templates, single product templates using full site editing. But the core experience of putting data into WooCommerce products will continue to be a very structured way of inputting data. In fact, if I was running WooCommerce, I would make it more abstract still because basically the interface you want for inputting data into products isn’t a visual building interface.

You want it a structured data interface. I think if I was there, I would kind of update that interface to have a nice, sexy interface, but it wasn’t a page building interface that should happen naturally in the full site editing template building section of it. And that gives me a nice abstraction. That’s where you put your data into your products. This is where you actually design your product page and full site editing just absolutely nails that. That’s what I would concentrate on if I were them. I’m sure they will.

Bob: Well, I think to kind of wrap this up, I think Anna has one non-Woo question. I mean, we like to talk Woo but I know fortunately you have a life beyond Woo too. I’m sure she has something on her mind.

Anna: Well, it’s not that personal, but I have a personal curiosity. I want to know more about your Zwift’s art project. I find it really beautiful and interesting and really completely out of what you’re doing on a day to day basis.

Jamie: Yes. This is going to be quite hard to explain. Zwift is an online cycling game. It’s indoor cycling. And it’s absolutely enormous and hugely popular. You get on your bike and I’m a keen cyclist and you have this virtual world that you cycle around, but it’s really for cyclists and it measures all your stats and you go up and down dills and you can race against other people. It’s a huge online gaming experience, but it’s a fitness game. It’s a bit like Peloton, but kind of for proper cyclists. Sorry Peloton people out there. It’s enormously popular. And then a few years ago, I had this idea that people… so when people cycle, they have these, they call them pain caves. Pain caves.

They basically kid out dens or studios or studies where they do their cycling. And I had this idea that people would like to have some art on their wall as they’re doing their cycling. I came up with the idea of creating some art around Zwift. We’ve created this beautiful piece of art all hand drawn by this artist I worked with of the mountains in this virtual world. And we approached Zwift and the CEO and they loved the idea and they gave us the green light for the project. We launched that about a year and a half, two years ago, just as a side hustle. But again, it’s my passion. It’s another passion project. And it’s just been a fantastically fun project to do. It’s at Zwiftart.com if you want to go and check it out. It’s cool stuff.

Anna: I learned that it was really complicated to translate the three dimensional world into one-dimension.

Jamie: Man, yeah. Yeah. Because you’re trying to encapsulate a 3D world in one image and make it beautiful as well. It was a very creative project. Sold it through WooCommerce of course, as well. The platform was WooCommerce. There we go.

Anna: Jamie, where can people connect with you?

Jamie: Yep. Website is Pootlepress.com. Twitter is @Pootlepress. Those are probably the best places. Or YouTube. Just go and Google Gutenberg on YouTube. And you’ll find me dominating the search results for Gutenberg on YouTube because I do about two Gutenberg videos a week. I’m currently 3,700 subscribers growing 400 a month and going crazy on YouTube. My target next year to hit 10,000 subscribers, which I’m 100 below per month run rate. I need more subscribers. Actually, forget what I said. Just go to YouTube and subscribe to my channel. Subscribe. Yeah. And actually we might be doing some really, really cool, exciting stuff that I can’t talk about yet with a big company potentially on YouTube going forward. But anyway, more on that another time. Yeah. YouTube. Go and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Bob: Excellent. Do check out his YouTube channel and Jamie just would like to thank you for coming on the show. It’s been great.

Jamie: Thank you Anna. Thank you Bob. It’s been great. Thank you.