In this episode, Ben gives an update on the upcoming features in both Kadence Blocks Pro and Kadence Blocks 3.1, and an overview of the teams working on new blocks as well as Kadence AI. As well, the team looks at the purpose of landing pages, elements that make a landing page effective, as well as things that make landing pages miss their target.

Welcome to episode 29 of the Cadence Beat.

I am here with my good friends Hannah and Ben.

It feels like it's been a little while since we've done this, so this is fun.

It's good to be back in the saddle and let's talk about cadence.

Do you want to give us a lowdown on everything that's in the hopper?

We had our little episode with Shane Pearlman from Modern Tribe last week.

Talked a little bit about AI, but I know there's lots of other things happening with Cadence, so I'll just tee you up with that.

We have multiple teams working on different parts of the Cadence products.

And so while we are working on AI, a lot with modern tribe and kind of some of the architecture around how we even do the design library.

We've just in the last couple of months added like 340 now patterns to our design library.

And then each pattern has 3 different styles.

So there's a lot of benefits non AI related that are coming through that project as well.

And then we're currently looking at potentially 2 weeks till we released the beta version of block 3.1, which will have the advanced form block, the progress bar block.

It'll have some cool other features involving like how we handle some of the unique IDs inside of all of our blocks.

And then the ability to rename stuff in the list view and things like that.

And then as we project out some, there's more blocks coming.

We're working on a repeater field block for ACF and other plugins that give you meta box controls and then an advanced query block That will be filterable and templateable and that kind of thing.

So you can create real custom filters and custom templates for query loops inside of WordPress.

So that'll be probably the most advanced block rule we've ever tried to tackle.

And that's, that 1 is getting exciting in terms of the architecture planning.

And then as we like even project out even more than there's like advanced navigation block for mega menus and building in your header and things like that.

And that's just something like cadence blocks part.

And then of course we're doing stuff with the cadence theme shop kit.

There's some new UI stuff in shop kit for the admin, as well as new features.

We're looking at releasing inside of shop kit coming up.

There is a lot happening all at once, all the time.

And, but also it's starting to feel like we're really going to hit our stride in terms of like consistent releases for new features over the second part of the year.

Whereas so much has been on just really big projects.

It's now moving to like projects that are a little bit more, a little bit easier to define and scope and say, this is the project and then get that out and release it, which is nice.

Cause some of the big stuff, like let's rewrite the entire way that we code blocks is just so hard to scope and creates.

So that's exciting from the dev perspective.

And I think as we move along, the stuff with AI is really cool, but just even the stuff with the design library and page templates, like that's just going to be a significant improvement, like 1 thing we're doing within that is the ability to search pexels for images that match.

And that's going to come into our advanced image block and all things like that, where you'll be able to instantly pull from pixels.

So where it's like right now, if you're getting into pixels and you download it, then you've got to resize it and you've got to compress it.

We do all that process and you just search, pick and install, which is going to be awesome.

And mapping that out to work with AI content.

It's like, you're going to be able to build your own collections, have that automatically replaced in all the design library.

So even the images are really custom to what you're working with.

Hannah, the cadence group, I see all of these requests.

I'm excited to hear that we are going to get to a place where things are more level and balanced because Ben, I often worry if you ever sleep.

And actually, I know for a fact you don't sleep that much.

Also, I just think that'll be super helpful for the community just knowing, okay, now this is like a more set structure of when they can expect releases and things like that.

And I think that's a good reminder, especially for our community.

Changing the entire way that blocks is written is a huge deal.

And so it makes sense that things have been delayed and all of that, but I'm excited for what's coming.

And I always want to try to get our roadmaps more like solid and defined as we're looking forward.

But it's so important to be able to pivot and we have to do it all the time based on what's going on.

So we got into the design library project and it was like, Hey, we're making all these patterns, but we really want like a dark version of all of these patterns.

And so we did a pivot where it was like, let's make that something that we can.

Automatically have with every single pattern we make with a click of a button, rather than making 2 versions of every single pattern or 3 versions of every single pattern that we have to manage and update anytime we want to change anything in those patterns.

And so it's stuff like that, where it's like, this is a huge thing to pivot because it's going to save so much in the development as well as like instantly give our customers that much more to work with And so stuff like that happens all the time where I'm like, I think I'm going to be working on this week.

And then it'll be like, Hey, you know what?

We got to dive in and just do it now so that this team can keep moving here.

And it's so hard to project out a roadmap.

That's like really time sensitive because stuff happens and we move in.

2 weeks ago, I spent a day of my time trying to figure out why on certain websites, the mobile menu was closing automatically and 8 hours of time.

Like I spent a whole day doing every kind of test imaginable and following every single event that happens in JavaScript to try to figure this thing out.

And in the end, it was a cloud flare has a minification tool and they had a bug in it and they push out an update and that fixed it.

And so there was literally at the end of that whole thing, there was nothing I could do other than to say it's already fixed.

That is exactly what we have to run into sometimes.

We have to spend time to figure out what these issues are because

And sometimes it's things like that where it's like, someone else pushed out a bug and we need to figure out why.

And it affects our customers, but foundationally you made changes to cadence blocks, just the entire foundation of that plugin was rewritten.

Now I've been on dev teams where that doesn't happen, where you just like layer another thing on and then layer another thing on top of that, and you don't do the foundational rewrite.

And that's where you get into like software bloat, and it can cause so many problems, right?

Have you seen that type of situation and is that why you tried to avoid that?

Yeah, especially in software that's moving as quickly as Gutenberg is right now.

That's part of the real trick is that Gutenberg is changing so much all the time.

And so that kind of need to like, okay, we got to go back a little bit.

Ideally, you don't, you shouldn't have to do like a complete let's dig it all up and rebuild it.

Like you can, you can be like, okay, we're going to do this section first.

And there, looking back, like there were wins we could have done throughout that project that would have been like, let's just push this chunk in and make that work.

It's still tricky to do with all of the testing and everything like that, but that could have been a bigger win.

I ideally we, you don't want to be in a place where like, we need to tear this out and start over.

But just given the nature of Gutenberg and the way that core has changed so quickly and the time at which we wrote and the time and where we are now.

That became necessary as we dove into, Hey, we want to do more advanced stuff.

This is a roadblock for like how optimized we're going to be able to make code in the editor.

And so much came down to the editor and not even the front end, which always gets frustrating when you're like, Hey, we know this work, but it doesn't actually improve the front end because like, that's not what we were trying to solve for.

So the structure we have now does have a lot of optimizations for the front end and gives us a really good place to be like, we can more iteratively update from here a lot easier than we previously could by adding in like our whole components library and just re-changing the way that blocks are loaded and saved and presented on the front end.

It really does a whole lot of stuff that makes it easier to build on and unlikely that we'll need to do something like that again, because Gutenberg is a much more mature product.

So we're following a lot of their core structure and then able to just move on from there.

And to get some clarification, because I know there's been some questions.

We've talked a little bit about Cadence AI and there's a wait list ready for it.

We had Shane on our last podcast talk about that entire project that Modern Tribe is leading.

The Cadence AI project is very separate than what's happening with Block.

There's 2 different teams, there's 2 different project managers.

So obviously I jumped from team to team, but in general, we have people, including myself, who are working on Block 3.1.

And at the same time, people, including myself, we're working on AI and they're different people, obviously same company, but just different teams.

The Modern Tribe team, the team that works on internal projects.

And so that team is the team that's helping Cadence right now with a number of different things that are exciting.

Yeah, I'm very excited about it, but it's not slowed down the pace of everything else that's happening within Cadence.

And I love to see it because I am excited about some of the things coming.

I'm just like so excited that the Advanced Form block is going to be in Cadence Free.

And I know a lot of other people who are going to be extremely excited about that too.

Can't wait to test that out and start playing with it.

So I, just to tell you the story, because I'm all about the stories, I had to do this presentation about how to build landing pages.

And I'm like, I'm going to wait for this design library and do it with that because it's going to be so much easier.

I literally, in this demo, like 10 minutes, Cadence landing page built out with the design library.

Because the design library, if you haven't played with it yet, has pages in it where you can just like, home page, all right, and you can just pop in your own images and text.

The design library going through each individual section and deciding what I wanted to do, it made everything so fast.

So I was really happy to have that as I was building out landing pages.

So I just keep seeing more and more benefits coming out of the stuff that's developing.

But I'm from both teams and I think that's amazing.

Is it just your homepage or what's a landing page?

Yeah, I feel like the marketer should be the 1 to answer this.

Cause you guys browse the web, Ben, you develop so that people can design for the web.

So I want to get everybody's thought on what is a landing page and what makes it effective?

But it essentially should be a page that tells viewers what they're there for.

So if you're selling something, what you're selling, what your mission is, and then you should all should also be beautiful and engaging and make people want to stay on the site and see what else is going on.

And it's your like, your 2 second moment to capture somebody or not.

I think when I think of landing pages, I just have to go to Donald Miller because he's so ingrained in me.

What's your mission and is your mission obvious on your landing page?

Somebody goes to your website in 2 seconds.

Can they, do they know what you're selling and do they want it?

A landing page, I often hear about it as different from the homepage or different from any other page on your site, because it's a page specific to a certain customer that you're trying to land there.

So I'm doing an ad for this and I want them to land here.

That's not to say that all the rules of like your homepage, which is also like a page people land on or whatever, don't apply to your landing page.

But sometimes people create landing pages where there's no nav.

It's literally, I want you to just focus on this 1 thing.

And I'm not trying to take you to my website as much as I'm trying to get you to go from clicking an ad to purchasing or putting in your email or whatever.

And so like sometimes you'll build custom landing pages that literally don't have the header and footer and just have a very, I just want to draw you right to this button to do the action.

And so then they're coincided with a marketing campaign of some kind.

So the way now the marketer gets to talk, right?

So let's talk about a couple that I was looking at.

So Spotify, the 2 landing pages I was looking at, and I'm going to link them down below if you're watching on YouTube or if go look at the show notes.

Spotify has a landing page that talks all about free and then they have 1 for premium because people are in different mindsets then, right?

So you have to meet your customer where they're at.

If somebody is just, I don't know who hasn't heard of Spotify, but let's imagine this mythical person, somebody who has come out of the forest, Rip Van Winkle, I think I'd like to listen to music on this thing.

And they look at Spotify free, very simple website, get started, listen.

But then once they are in the mindset of, I would like to drop some cash on it so I don't have to listen to ads.

Now, what kind of cash do you want to drop on this?

What are the things that you're going to get if you drop monthly payment on having Spotify on your phone with no ads?

What is all that you're going to get from it and which tier is right for you?

Each customer is a different persona, is a different mindset, is interacting with the brand very differently.

And then the other 1 that I looked at was Airbnb.

They have their landing page for people like you and me who are like, get me out of here.

And you go to airbnb.com and that homepage, that landing page is like, look at all of these experiences.

And then you can search and get into what you want, but they also have a landing page for hosts.

And looking at that is so amazing because they really meet you where you're at.

Cause they have the slider that tells you how much money you can make.

And they're doing IP detection and geolocation and saying, okay, you're in this town in Texas, how much money you can make from your house in Texas, because that's where you're coming from.

Talk about meeting people where they're at and connecting with them.

So if I ever land on that page, obviously I'm searching perhaps for how much money can I get for renting out my son's room who left me?

I'm not gonna rent out your room, Max, really.

look at how it meets you exactly where, it was amazing, because it's just like this, it's a perfect example of some designer who's looking at this landing page and I want to meet this person exactly where they at.

Not only geolocating, but what are they thinking about?

And then it's just like, Oh, you've got this objection.

And it's just like handling every objection about strangers coming into your home.

If you build landing pages, it's in the show notes.

Go look at this page for hosts for Airbnb.

And there's a lot of things that you can learn from it just by how it's meeting customers, your site visitors, your hosts where they're at.

So I thought that was a really great example.

Any, Any site that you've landed on where it's just, wow, this company knows me?

I would say more often than not, I get frustrated by landing pages.

Like you do a Google search and I'll like search for the name of the company that I want to find, right?

Like I want to get onto your website and I will click the first 1 because it's just the default, which happens to be an ad because people put ads for their own keywords.

And then it will take me to a landing page without a menu driving me and I'm going to find something out.

I'm not like a potential customer in the sense of I'm looking for a feature.

I typed in your name and I'll get on this landing page where I'm like, no, I'm actually looking for information.

I actually just want to get to a certain page.

And so I always find that like incredibly frustrating when people don't have a nav on a page.

Outside of a checkout, I'm like adamantly opposed to like creating pages without nav.

So oftentimes, I feel like the ones that are meant to be targeting a certain person's experience, it's so easy to not get that right.

And then you end up with a customer back out and go find that actual link in Google.

Cause just let me go to the page or I'll manually have to like change the URL.

Cause even the logos on those pages don't take me to like their homepage, which is what I want to do.

They call them in the marketing vernacular, a squeeze page, because you're trying to reduce the number of decisions that a site visitor could possibly make where you don't have navigation.

The biggest example I would say would be like Amazon's checkout.

Once you click checkout, it's like, all right, let's get to business.

We don't want to talk about putting anything else to the cart.

You're not going to go look for discounts.

You are checking out and we're here to help.

So there's a time when you want to reduce the number of decisions that a customer or a site visitor could possibly make and just get them through that process.

But when you're in the initial stages, when somebody, when Rip Van Winkle comes out of the forest and says, how do I listen to music?

You want to make it extremely simple, but you don't want to take away the exploration of the brand.

You want to give them all of the possibilities to get started and to get started free, you can upsell them later.

You just want somebody to just immerse themselves into the experience of your brand and so your website and that landing page better do that.

So I can see how that would be like extremely frustrating, especially when you're just getting to know a brand.

When I follow Instagram ads, often landing pages and those are like, I'm not looking for the nav in that experience.

I think it's the Google ads that go to a landing page that get me.

Whereas from Instagram, I don't wanna be taken to your homepage if you just showed me a product.

you just talked about a certain deal, I don't want to be taken to a different page and have to go find the deal on your site.

It's always nice to land on the landing page there because I followed the link, that context, that specific link.

You just talked about this specific feature.

Make sure it's front and center when I get there and wanna learn more.

Trying to think of what Instagram ad I recently just got trapped into.

I keep seeing Jack Kiley and I think of you every time.

Speaking of sites that keep things front and center, what you need right there, charitywater.org.

They are a nonprofit and I'm obsessed with what they do, but basically their mission, which is right there on the landing page, is help bring clean and safe water to every person on the planet.

And then right there, you don't even have to scroll, there's, do you want to give once?

So if you were like, at all inspired to give to Charity Water.

It's not like you're having to search at all.

They could not make it easier for you to give.

And then there's like this beautiful video of these beautiful kids in Africa getting clean water and it's like just so inspiring and engaging and it's all, you don't even have to scroll at all.

That's all just like when you open the landing page, that's what you get.

So I feel like they've done an excellent job.

Yeah, is there, what are you looking for when you're researching a product?

What elements on a landing page are the things that really draw you in, that help you engage and you feel like you got what you came for?

I love like a photo that either is, oh, I want to be there, that person sitting there in that place with that product, or else just like a picture that's inspiring.

They like go such a long way versus if people have images that are clearly stock photos or just poor quality.

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Creating Clarity in Your Landing Pages