In this episode, Cory Miller and Corey Maass discuss preparations for WordCampUS and designing business cards for the event. They receive feedback on their design and decide on a winning business card design that includes pricing information and a QR code. They also discuss the content and layout of their product’s landing page, adding a coupon code and creating an intro video. They plan to create videos together at WordCampUS to promote their mailing list and discuss the importance of having tangible items like business cards to hand out. They also talk about showcasing their product in different devices and browsers to make it visually appealing.
Top Takeaways:
- Collaboration and Progress: Corey Maass and Cory Miller demonstrate effective collaboration and progress in their project. They discuss the successful execution of their plan, highlighting their teamwork and positive momentum.
- Schema Markup: They discuss the importance of schema markup for images, which impacts how Google displays images in search results. This feature allows for better control over how their images appear in search engine results.
- Device Image Mockups: The conversation highlights the addition of device image mockups to OMG IMG, enhancing the presentation of images and improving the service’s overall user experience.
Mentioned in the show:
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- Corey Maass
- Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Corey Maass (00:00:00) – Boom Session 22.
Cory Miller (00:00:06) – All right. Session 22 Corey and Cory products preparing for WordCampUS which Geez, man. What’s that? Two weeks away.
Corey Maass (00:00:14) – Right? Exactly.
Cory Miller (00:00:17) – Yeah. Ali. All right.
Corey Maass (00:00:21) – I’m sure you have everything under control. No, No pressure. You’re. You’re probably already packed.
Cory Miller (00:00:31) – Oh, yeah. I packed right after San Diego. No, I just stayed packed from San Diego.
Corey Maass (00:00:37) – There you go. Yeah. Yeah, You have your. I actually used to have WordCamp shoes. Slightly nicer sneakers. Basically, like Keds that I used to wear, pretty much only to WordCamps. So they just stayed in the duffel bag that I would bring to WordCamps between those and like the marketing T-shirt. Yeah, that had for Kanban. Oh, speaking of so we do have the OMG IMG t shirts. I should have gotten them up. Um. But also I need to it’s a it’s official like we’ve talked before about how how many projects I always have going on around the house.
Corey Maass (00:01:19) – And so I have officially so the post status t shirt that I always wear. I finally got paint on it. So I think
Cory Miller: I`ll get you a new one,
Corey Maass: Well, it’s the I think I want a t shirt credit. During the giveaway at Christmas.
Cory Miller: Oh, that’s right.
Corey Maass: So, yeah, it’s time for me to. To actually cash it in. I need a new t shirt because it’s. Yeah, I was mad. Naw, I’m so careful because I have work clothes. Um. It’s not actually paint. It’s. I don’t remember. Oh, it’s wood glue. It’s wood glue. But for some reason it won’t come out in the wash anyway. Could tell I have not had enough sleep. I am all over the place. Um, so, yeah, the first thing I wanted to talk about was we had talked about doing a business card. Specific to for WordCamp US and I, I actually posted this in I hope you don’t mind I didn’t think you’d care in Justin Jackson’s Mega Maker Slack community which is just a great another business you know community people helping each other out.
Corey Maass (00:02:40) – So I posted in there an image of this and said Cory and I are going to WordCamp US. We were thinking about having this printed. What do you think? Um, and this was the one I originally showed you. So the really good feedback that I got, which you would mentioned but I’d forgotten about, was to put a QR code, um, so that people can scan it if they don’t want to type in the URL. And then the so that I’m thinking this might be the back of it and I think this would be black and white, but I think that’s fine. Um, and then so the logo would obviously be black and white, but don’t again I don’t think it. It matters. There you go. But then so a couple of so basically an alternate front side was people said an added incentive would be to actually add some pricing like not just this is a super secret launch, but like this card entitles you to something which we had talked about. So I created this other alternate one and wanted to see what you thought about it.
Corey Maass (00:03:59) – And then ideally to me, ideally we pick one of these and then I’ll get them printed today because like we said, it’s two weeks away. I’m getting a little nervous that we’re out of time.
Cory Miller (00:04:11) – Um. Could you push the first one again? And. Okay. Yeah, I like the second and third.
Corey Maass (00:04:22) – Yo seeking to on the back. QR code on the front. Something that you know we had joked about I guess you can’t see multiple tabs right? No see a different tab. You see the same one, so.
Cory Miller (00:04:41) – Oh, I do see. I just saw a Google doc. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:04:44) – Okay, cool. So we had talked about doing some sort of game or something, which I kind of think we could still do, but I think we might be out of time. But doing and we talked about I think down the road we can be more clever with doing the like before and after kind of thing. But for now, like we talked about, we joked or joked, half joked about like, this card will expire or this card will explode or, you know, it was like Inspector Gadget style.
Corey Maass (00:05:22) – Um. But to me, so to me, like this language could be a lot more fun or funny or. And. Or do we want to? Lock ourselves into. A price. Or say, you know, this card entitles you to special pricing or something like that.
Cory Miller (00:05:43) – Yeah. I think it’s super secret launch of OMG IMG this card is good for 49 a year and if you wanted to make it funny, I mean you could say, Now go tell 500 other people or you know what I mean? Like like if you tell this card is good for $49 a year, if you tell 500 more people.
Corey Maass (00:06:06) – That’s awesome. I can fix the spacing later, but. It’s making me laugh out loud. So I think that’s the winner. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I’ll do something with that. And and then on the back. Yep. To find out more. It just seemed simple. Something like we said something we can hand out. I looking at it now, I’m also thinking like, maybe we want to do something that says like WordCamp US 2023.
Corey Maass (00:06:54) – Um. Because it’s like part of what? To me, part of what I wanted with this was like, to make it special. To this day, right. It’s like so that people at WordCamp. Us are like this is for me, rather than it being, you know, like we could be giving these out as if we keep it anonymous or unspecific. We could be giving these out for the next year. And so to me, I’d feel cool if I was at WordCamp US and I was like, Oh, this is they printed these just for this event. Like this is actually just for me. But I’m probably overthinking it. What do you think?
Cory Miller (00:07:45) – Um. There’s something to that working thing. Um. I think the more. The one thing I was thinking about, it’s not related to this necessarily, but was leaving the back door open, not putting the logo on the back. Okay. Just because if we wanted to like write a note or something like that. It gives some space.
Cory Miller (00:08:20) – I was just thinking like I usually take my own business cards, but I never bring them. And so, you know, I could I could hand these out to people as kind of my card, you know, put my, like, right in my email, like, oh, well, I don’t have a card right here. Here, I got this. I got my own card right on the back.
Corey Maass (00:08:43) – Good thinking. Yeah, I used to. I used to do that, too. Where I’d keep. I hated black business cards and I hated business cards that were completely covered because it was if I took your card, I want to be able to write on it, you know, like what we talked about or something. So that’s a great idea. All right. I’ll play with it one more time this afternoon. And then how many do you think we want? 100,000.
Cory Miller (00:09:18) – 200,000.
Corey Maass (00:09:21) – I was thinking, like either 500 or 1000.
Cory Miller (00:09:24) – Yeah, I think 500. Probably be good.
Cory Miller (00:09:29) – It seems like.
Corey Maass (00:09:30) – Enough. Yeah.
Cory Miller (00:09:33) – And therefore we’ll take 100 each day or something.
Corey Maass (00:09:36) – Yeah. Cool. Okay.
Cory Miller (00:09:39) – Yeah, that sounds good to me.
Corey Maass (00:09:41) – And then the other thing to discuss is the actual page. You see us. So I just. Since I had started talking about it, I wanted to put something up here. Um. We talked about creating videos. We talked about starting to add some. Wording about what’s actually coming. You’re muted if you’re.
Cory Miller (00:10:36) – Sorry. You probably want to. Probably want to put the coupon code here. Right.
Corey Maass (00:10:42) – Okay.
Cory Miller (00:10:46) – That looks great.
Corey Maass (00:10:49) – And I’ll add a hidden section. Text editor settings advanced display logged in users save. So yeah, like coupon code. And then I was thinking, so we had talked about. A landing page. So I will create the other page that just has the sign up. Yeah. And then you and I can add it to our phones, you know, like the morning of the first day or whatever. Um, and then we had talked about doing like an intro video, and I was.
Corey Maass (00:11:33) – I’m sorry.
Cory Miller (00:11:33) – We don’t need the coupon code because we’re not. We’re going to get them to the forgot. You get them on the email address, then send them the.
Corey Maass (00:11:40) – Oh right, right. So we’ll just we’ll email them. Yeah. So the whole point is to get people to sign up for the mailing list. Yeah. Okay. Um, but initially I was thinking that we would talk like we would do videos. Sorry about the dogs. Um. But I thought, um. I mean, I know we’ll both be running around like crazy, but we should do the videos together at WordCamp. Yeah. And then. And then we’ll. We’ll just put it up here.
Cory Miller (00:12:23) – She’s on her phone or something.
Corey Maass (00:12:25) – What’s that?
Cory Miller (00:12:27) – She did on her phone.
Corey Maass (00:12:29) – Oh, yes, yes, yes. Sorry. I thought you said she is on her phone. I didn’t know who she was. Um, yeah, exactly. Like, we’ll just hallway track. We’ll just have somebody hold a camera for us, take a couple of practices, and then stick it on here.
Corey Maass (00:12:43) – I think it’ll be fun because it’ll be impromptu and timely. So cool. Okay. So those are kind of the two main things. I’m just trying to wrap up, get some of this stuff like these things in in order. I wanted something here so that if people did check on it the day of then they’d see something. Um, and then, yeah. And then sort out the business cards because I think that’ll be. I’m hopeful that handing out cards like that will be beneficial.
Cory Miller (00:13:24) – At least we have something.
Corey Maass (00:13:26) – Right? Exactly.
Cory Miller (00:13:27) – In her hands to hand out. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:13:31) – So the only other thing that I’ve got is a bit of show and tell. We now have. Um, I’ve updated the design a little bit, but we now have, um, device images so you can choose. I’ve only got a couple in here at the moment, but you can choose for the moment an iPhone and then actually let’s test this. If you go to. A single post. So if you plug in.
Corey Maass (00:14:08) – We’ll have to come up with a better way to do this, but. And then you create it. Hey. So there it is in the iPhone.
Cory Miller (00:14:17) – Nice.
Corey Maass (00:14:19) – That went nice and quick, too. And then you can also I added a browser version.
Cory Miller (00:14:27) – That’s okay. Now it says device image, but like we’re saying, this is that. Conceptually could be the featured image, right? Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:14:40) – It’s just yeah, it was just the like again, this is essentially me putting it together. But we can do because I was looking at, uh. Doop doop. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope. Where to go? Yeah. So this lets you create beautiful screenshots and. And I’m I’m so curious where they get all of their devices. But you can so you can wrap it in a browser. You can wrap it in a phone. You can wrap it in a desktop browser, iPhones. Pixels. Laptops. Even even a wow. Sure. Something. So I’m trying to figure out where they get all these device images.
Corey Maass (00:15:50) – I’ve found some. We’ll have to buy a buy some of these templates, but that’s worth it. Um. But yeah so, you know, device is not. The word we will use in the end for the UI, but maybe mockup is the right word actually. Um, but yeah, so this is kind of the goal is to be able to say, okay, you know, pick a phone, pick a browser, pick whatever.
Cory Miller (00:16:17) – That’s basically the frame for the open graph image. I mean, it’s the open graph image, but it’s framed.
Corey Maass (00:16:25) – Right. So it’s like, you know, this is and this is with like, we will have to sit down and do some. Product design at some point. And ideally this and this screen actually becomes a pop up, essentially a modal in. So it’s like if you’re editing an actual OMG image. Um, this one already has one, right? Like, ideally, you would say you’d go to image and you’d say from the dropdown, you’d say like device image or create mockup.
Corey Maass (00:17:00) – And then this screen would open in a modal and you’d say, What picture, What page do you want to take a picture of? What do you want to wrap it in an iPhone or whatever? You’d say, you know, done save the modal would close and then it would appear. As the you know, as the image here. Gotcha. For now, it’s a little clunky, but, you know, you come in here, I don’t know which ones we have. So I don’t have any phone in the in the media library. So if you come here, you say create a device, you’d say iPhone. Let’s just take a picture of the home page. You’d say, Save to media library. Great. That is now saved. And then now if you create a a normal OMG IMG image. Under images, you’d go media library select file my iPhone picture and there. There’s that one that I just created.
Cory Miller (00:18:07) – Okay, that right there. Super cool. Like that end result. That’s so awesome.
Corey Maass (00:18:16) – Yeah, Yeah. I’m really psyched about it. And.
Cory Miller (00:18:21) – You know, you do so much work on your website design and. You know, when you’re doing a social, you don’t get a lot of that branding work. And so, like having this in that little bottle is a way to kind of use the featured image, but show it like where you’re going to get when you click through kind of thing. Mm hmm. That’s cool.
Corey Maass (00:18:45) – Yeah. This I’m I’m super jazzed that I got that working and and it looks as good as it does and it’s pretty easy to add more devices. We need to just go find. Or pay somebody to to create the, you know, the templates, basically.
Cory Miller (00:19:02) – But I think the Safari one is super awesome.
Corey Maass (00:19:07) – It’s probably the one that’s going to be used the most. And one of the other things that they had in shots in that app I just showed you is they actually had a safari browser because I’ve heard this complaint before. There’s a you can say a safari style browser, a chrome style browser or an edge style browser.
Corey Maass (00:19:27) – And they’re all still very, um, you know, graphically like. You know, cute vector image like they’re not an accurate because they’re not meant to be. But you know some people get annoyed that everything is so Mac oriented, apple oriented. And so you know to be able to say here are a few different browser styles, I think it’ll be be great.
Cory Miller (00:19:56) – I think that app you showed me like, you know, I could see using one of these just like they did with some kind of, you know, tonal background kind of thing. And I mean, that’s a great social media featured image, right?
Corey Maass (00:20:15) – Right? Yeah. It’s a step beyond just a screen, a step beyond your just the featured image and info or your logo and info. You know, like this. Like to be able to put that in a browser or in a phone, you know? I mean, that was one of the things when we were brainstorming months ago, it was like, Holy crap, if we could do this based on like your mockups, right? Like, you know, if we can get so that it’s, it’s wrapped in a phone, like, wow, that takes it to the next level because that’s what we saw a lot of.
Corey Maass (00:20:51) – Again. Don’t know where I have it. Oh, OG image gallery. Like looking through, you know, what other people are doing. You know, they want to make dynamic sites and so it’s like cool images flying around, you know, some clever taxonomy. But there were good examples of like this like, you know, device images. So it’s, you know, sharing with people like seeing it the way they’re going to see it. Like it’s here’s a product on a screen or if it’s, you know, even us selling OMG, OMG, we want to be able to show you how it works. So like putting it in a browser, it gives it context. I think that’s huge.
Cory Miller (00:21:29) – Yeah, because I always think about that in result. It’s having a nice. Looking image with. Little effort. You know this one right here, my Matisse. You know, it’s like having that on you just like we did in the screenshots and stuff. It’s like, Yeah, you know, having said that, it just looks a little bit nicer and people are going how they do that, you know?
Corey Maass (00:21:58) – So, um.
Corey Maass (00:22:00) – So the next thing I’m working on is the brand, what I’m calling the brand overlay. So like the little a 24 here or the little data pulse, um, because we had talked about an option where basically any featured image you upload, it puts your little watermark on it essentially. Um, so, so trying to figure out where I’m going to put that. Um. And then. Uh, what did we just talk about? Oh, the other very exciting thing is, at some point, you asked me. Okay, so when you Google for something, um. I don’t know. American Airlines, maybe. They’re squares. That’s not a great example. But anyway, at some point, Oh, here, maybe sort of, kind of. Anyway, in Google I figured out how to how to put an image, how to put that, how they, how you can, you can provide that logo.
Cory Miller (00:23:08) – Oh yeah. Right there.
Corey Maass (00:23:13) – Yeah. So do they.
Cory Miller (00:23:15) – Selectively pull an image?
Corey Maass (00:23:18) – Um, so it’s similar to.
Corey Maass (00:23:20) – Oh yeah. So like here, so it’s, it’s, I should have picked up on this sooner. Um, it’s called, they call it, it’s part of schema. So in addition to your OG images. So Twitter now has a card, which is their version of an image. There is the OG image, which is Facebook’s creation. And then you see here there’s the Yoast schema graph, and it’s in this Json block, this code block that it specifies what image is used picked up by Google. And so I messaged you midweek. So one of the exciting things that I was able to bang out in surprisingly a little time was I went to. WordPress.org plugins I typed in SEO. It’s like, okay, what are the what are the biggest ones? And then went through each of their documentation and figured out how to overwrite, how to use our images in their plugins. So we now support the six biggest ones, which is cool. We can always add more as we go along. Excellent.
Corey Maass (00:24:33) – And then and in so doing, also saw in a few places the documentation for also overwriting that schema image. And so we can basically you’ll be able to say when you create an OG image here, you’ll be able to right now right you can say save as open graph image, but you’ll also be able to say save as schema image. We’ll have to come up with a friendlier term or say or if it’s in a if it’s post related, you can say save as featured image. So lots of options. Like you’re building these images, manipulating them, repeating them, which I’m starting to work on more. And then you can do all this stuff with them, which is, you know, the coolest part.
Cory Miller (00:25:22) – Excellent.
Corey Maass (00:25:25) – Yep. So, yeah, I’ve been busy.
Cory Miller (00:25:29) – That’s awesome, man.
Corey Maass (00:25:31) – Um, yeah, I think I’m getting close to where I want to because I did update the home page. I think I told you. OMGIMG.co. Um. Oops. So there’s only a couple.
Corey Maass (00:25:47) – There’s we had we had a bunch of stuff hidden. Oh, I changed. I updated that. Like we have hidden the buy it again, buy it today because obviously we have placeholder images. But I’d started dropping in the like before and after Twitter and then Slack. I’m going to need your help because I technically I’m on LinkedIn, but I have no idea how to use it. So we’ll need you to to go and post a post something for a minute that doesn’t have an image so we can take a picture of it. And so then we can say LinkedIn boring to LinkedIn engaging or whatever. But more and more of these examples integrations and then find all of our features. So all this stuff is actually visible now. The plans still are not because we’re still sort of despite talking about it here publicly, we’re not we haven’t decided really. And then eventually we’ll use your your use case. Your case study. Excellent. And I might plug in my music blog too. Oh, I also created a Twitter account for us all the Facebook account because I needed to test with them.
Corey Maass (00:27:04) – So I was like, okay, it’s time.
Cory Miller (00:27:07) – That’s awesome. Good word. Thank you. This is great.
Corey Maass (00:27:12) – Yeah, I’m psyched. I want. Yeah, because I owe. And so my point was, I’m just about to the point where I think I can. I’m starting to consider making a video like a product demo video because I think that would be real, real beneficial on the. The WordCamp US Page two of like Corey and Corey talking about the journey, why we’re doing it, who we are, be part of our journey, that stuff. But people already, at least a couple of people are like, So, so what the hell is it? What does it do? And so, you know, not doing the super polished explainer video per se, but doing a you know, let me let me start with a vanilla website and show you, you know, walk through building a couple of images and then showing you like, okay, so if I if I now drop this into Slack, you actually can see, you know, the OG image render and, and stuff like that.
Cory Miller (00:28:15) – Awesome.
Corey Maass (00:28:16) – I don’t know if I’ll get to that in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll try.
Cory Miller (00:28:24) – That’s great. I think we got all the ingredients. Thanks for all your work on this.
Corey Maass (00:28:29) – Yeah, the timing is worked out well. That’s all.
Cory Miller (00:28:34) – Good, Good.
Corey Maass (00:28:35) – There will be moments where you’re going. Corey, are you still alive? Because I haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks. But right now I’m able to to put my head down and get a lot done, so.
Cory Miller (00:28:46) – That’s excellent, man. It’s really good to work. Gosh, Makes you feel good. We. It plan executed plan for working at BHS and ongoing. Logs keep coming together.
Corey Maass (00:29:00) – There’s a hummingbird outside my window.
Cory Miller (00:29:03) – It’s a good sign. Yeah. So we should have called that hummingbird. This whole project, everything we’ve done so far, not just OMG, OMG, but hummingbird, because, you know, in indigenous shamanic work they talk about hummingbirds as an archetype and they have this internal GPS and they just kind of go, Joy, it’s the like, this has been our hummingbird project.
Cory Miller (00:29:33) – Our internal DPS is we want to do a cool product. So let us here. So Project Counting Bird, come and working for us.
Corey Maass (00:29:43) – The the funny thing about that. Why that makes me laugh is because. So we have a hummingbird feeder on our front porch and we have a number of hummingbirds that that flit in and out don’t usually they see them on the second floor, which is. That’s why it caught my eye. Um, they’re mean little bastards. Like they fight constantly and run each other off. And I’m like, okay, so maybe not that element of their journey, but they get territorial.
Cory Miller (00:30:11) – Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:30:12) – Very territorial. And it’s so funny because there’s like, there’s nothing to them, but, and, and they’re adorable. Uh, but yeah, they’re little. They’re mean.
Cory Miller (00:30:25) – Yeah. That’s the other side they say is like you don’t you in the shamanic um person I follow the shaman too. They talk about like embodying the hummingbird where it just has an internal GPS and it’s just kind of going not worrying about where the next piece of food is.
Cory Miller (00:30:40) – They just kind of go on internal GPS. Enjoy. But the downside is they can be also territorial. Right. So you nailed it.
Corey Maass (00:30:49) – Yep. Money. Cool. All right. So, yeah, I’ll keep pinging you with updates. I’ll let you know about the business cards. Okay. I found a place. Mostly I’m like I said, I mean, I’m not so because it’s kind of a one off I’m not so concerned about. Quality as long as it looks okay. Yeah, but I just. I want to make sure that they get here in time. So I’ll probably order it today.
Cory Miller (00:31:22) – Cool. Cool.
Corey Maass (00:31:25) – All right, man.
Cory Miller (00:31:27) – Thanks for Fran. Great work. Yeah.
