Dave Grey // Friendly Web Guy

#GrowThatBiz Week 3: Time to sit back and take a deep breath! It's the Friday before 10 days away with the family.✈️ This week has been a mix between finishing off the client area and other quality of live improvements now that @website_toolkit has 5(!) Early Bird customers. Wed / Thurs was spent on the new Feedback / Review widget, which will be very useful for reviewing site builds and ticking off pages have been reviewed while still on the page (no context switching). Today had a few minor fixes but was mostly website content updates to cover the recent changes and padding out the help area. I've created it to be easy to use, but help material is a key part of showing what a new service can do. Once I'm back there will be a lot more "How to" guides for all the time saving tips and tricks. No doubt I'll have a list of ideas written down once I'm back. If you know any agency owners that might be interested, please let them know about it (or even plugin companies with larger sites!) website-toolkit.co.uk/blog/founding-…

@tjerkienator Everyone is giving Grok a lot of free training data for then vs now aging process. Or am I just paranoid?

This is who runs this account

@williamsba WCEU 2025 in Basel, which was a couple of weeks before I left Corporate to go full-time self employed. Followed up with WCEU 2026 to try and market my wares (and do more sight-seeing). Doubt the budget will stretch to 3 years in a row.

First WordCamp I attended, and spoke at, back at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2009 in Baltimore. Watching @markjaquith give the keynote. I think he talked about his goals for a complete Media Library makeover in WordPress. What was your first WordCamp?

Tomorrow is going to be a day of screen shots and documentation. Given the lack of sleep I've had recently this might be interesting.

I love it when a plan comes together. It's one thing having a list of pages to check, but keeping track of which you've seen is always the fun part. With the enhanced feedback widget you can naturally work your way around the site marking them as reviewed.

You can't build & launch a new website without client feedback, which is why Website Toolkit will shortly be gaining a simple feedback widget. Check out this 5min video to see the core functionality, then buy one of the remaining Early Bird plans before the price bumps up at the end of the month. website-toolkit.co.uk/blog/founding-…

@PineDigitalCo @joeljenkins801 @elemntor You need ToggleWP installed on them to hide the update buttons from them. Then you just have 99 problems remaining!

@joeljenkins801 @elemntor Right? I found out about this from a client. Although I manage their updates, some just can't help but press the update button. 😅 So, I've gotten two pings asking, "do we need this?"

I'm so sick of this, @elemntor. I'm sick of everything you're doing. I wish I could wash my hands of you. I'm trying. YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT AGENCIES. You never have. THIS SHOULD NEVER BE IN THE DASHBOARD of my client's websites. Oh, and that, which looks to be an affiliate link over to @patchstackapp, c'mon. I thought you guys were done trying to satisfy private equity, and that's why you let people go. I never believed that for 2 seconds. @WPTutz

@travisstreet_ It's more fun that way!

Working on client platforms: "We shouldn't build until we have validation" Working on my own platforms:

@MarkJSzymanski I quite like this idea. Claude is now adding it to my new @website_toolkit service as it'll tie in nicely with the other tools.

Ever been building a website/web app for a client and needed their feedback on it? I know I have. What do you normally do? Go pay for some external review tool with a feature set you don't control, that's probably overkill and clunky as hell? Or maybe play email tag where they're describing "the button on the thing" and you have no clue what page they're even on? I'd rather not, so this time I tried something different. Was building a client site with Claude Code + Astro yesterday, and in about 20 minutes I spun up a little feedback widget and dropped it right on the dev site. Client sees a button on the page. They can type a note, grab a screenshot, upload an image, or record a voice memo. Hit send, and it comes straight to my email with the metadata attached, so I know the exact page it came from without asking. The voice memo part is the sleeper. People would way rather talk than type, and now they can, right on the page they're looking at. Whether they use it or not, just handing them that option is a way better experience than "email me your changes." That's cool, but let's take it further: My AIOS already has access to my email. So when feedback comes in, I just point it at the inbox. First three came in and I literally said "3 feedbacks came in, go make those adjustments." It went and made them. I could fully automate that loop, but that's a whole different kind of crazy. The point: I didn't pay for some random software I don't control. I built exactly what I needed, the client gets a better experience, and I keep control of my own context and how it flows to me. I love this.

@BridgetMWillard I said no, and I work with my wife. Normally it's a prefix for something that's going to cost me money, or go and have to collect.

How do you feel about being called “sweetie” at work?

@WarrenLNaida @natmiletic And for enterprise customers....

@natmiletic 1, 2, and 5. 3 and 4 if required.

What's actually in your WordPress maintenance retainer? 1. Plugin updates? 2. Security monitoring? 3. Monthly content edits? 4. Performance optimization? 5. Just... being available when something breaks? Curious what service mix keeps clients paying long term and what types of businesses actually need ongoing support.

@natmiletic Funny you should ask this, as it relates to my post from earlier about what people can do to stand out above the "norm": x.com/website_toolki…

@benswrite It was meant to be a quick trip for 1 large pot and some soil. Narrator: It was anything but...

@FriendlyWebGuy I fcking hate garden centres with a passion

Dragged out to the garden centre while Claude code with remote control is busy at home. This is what AI is meant to help with.

Reply with your latest website win and one lucky person will get to submit a site for a review to see what I can find and feedback on (privately).

@jeffr0 @TheCre8tiveDiva What shape is a lost parrot? A polly-gone.... I'll get my coat!

Well this is a first. Someone has an emotional support bird in Sam’s Club @TheCre8tiveDiva

There is still time to get an Early Bird price, 7 slots are left. website-toolkit.co.uk/blog/founding-…

For Website Toolkit I've been thinking about the long-term pricing for agencies after the Founding Member offer ends. Prior to this I had pondered pre-paid usage-based billing (to top up as needed). However, this is what I'm thinking of currently: "Your £49/mo subscription lets you manage unlimited projects, running standard on-site link & page checks (up to 2,000 URLs per domain) with up to 20 active monitored projects and a generous 80,000 monthly URL crawl budget. For media-heavy audits, outbound link heavy sites, or exceeding your monthly budget, you simply draw down from your Pre-paid Resource Pack, which you can top up anytime." There would be a Starter plan as well, at £19 p/m (see image). The existing "Per Domain" 90 pack would be updated to mention total allowances for those with occasional projects and to avoid subscriptions. If you run a web agency I'd be interested in knowing what you think.

As with all things the devil is in the detail. At first glance you think it's a false positive as you can see the image on your computer, but when you dig deeper some srcset images are indeed missing.

@BlakeWhittle7 Quote your hourly rate and see what they say after that.

I swear I am the only agency who knows how to migrate a site. Another agency is taking over one of our clients, and they want to schedule 2 calls with us for the migration, WP Access, SFTP, and a database dump. All of which I've provided them. Not rocket science.