Episode 17
In this episode Michelle Frechette and Delka Merchant welcome Ben Ritner from KadenceWP. They discuss how Kadence works and dive into Kadence AI, which was recently released. They also talk about learning AI deeply and what’s on the roadmap for KadenceWP.
Mentioned in this Episode
Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe, brought to you by StellarWP.
Welcome to WP Constellations, your WordPress exploration of the WordPress universe through StellarWP’s eyes. We have a lot of fun talking to people in the WordPress universe, and today we’re actually in the StellarVerse as we’re going to talk about Kadence and Kadence AI. First, let me introduce you to this week’s co host, Delka Merchant. Delka is the customer success manager at GiveWP. Thank you, Delka, for joining me. It’s nice to have you here. How are you?
[00:00:41] Delka: Anytime. Hey everyone, I’m doing good.
[00:00:44] Michelle: Nice for you to be here. Thanks for joining us. And our guest of honor today is Ben Ritner, who is the senior director of product development at StellarWP. And as I was joking, like, he birthed Kadence, he is the founder of Kadence. That is his baby. And so we’re going to talk about Kadence and Kadence AI today. But in spite of that wonderful introduction I just gave to you, Ben, first of all, welcome. Thank you for being here and talking to us today.
[00:01:09] Ben: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:11] Michelle: Of course. But tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do, not just with Kadence, but at StellarWP.
[00:01:18] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So I am newly into this role of thinking about product for all of Stellar, but I founded Kadence and I still spend most of my time thinking about Kadence and all the ways that it can help people build websites and build effective websites.
My day to day largely looks like I’m trying to solve problems for Kadence users. I’m trying to figure out better ways to do things in Kadence and then kind of more outside of that is how can the things that we’re learning in Kadence benefit Give? And how can the things that Give is learning from their users and their user base benefit Kadence? And how do I get some of that communication to happen, as well as how do we learn from each other in product development stuff in terms of like, hey, we just did an integration with AI. Do you want to do an integration with AI? We have a good system to accomplish that. And so that’s kind of going to be, as I go forward, how do I think more about how to work with multiple brands inside the Stellar universe to kind of lift everyone up and build cool stuff? It’s really fun. I like to think of myself as like a problem solver/tinkerer in terms of like, I just tend to be in that mindset of like, how could we fix this or do this or if someone wanted to do that. And so that’s where I get a lot of joy. So with all the other products now kind of in my wheelhouse of getting to explore, it’s really fun to think about, like, what could we do here and how could we change this?
[00:02:59] Michelle: Yeah, that’s really cool, actually. I think a lot of product owners, product managers, really do think about problem solving, not just for their product, but for the users out there. Right? So, like AI, we’re going to talk about Kadence AI today. And leaning into AI. AI is like, over the last year has been the biggest topic in tech, I think.
But before we get there, I want to talk about Kadence a little bit. Because Kadence sometimes gets called a page builder. Sometimes it’s referred to as a theme, other times it’s blocks. I will say I have used it, I have proudly built, and I always probably annoy you. I’m like, look, I built another site with Kadence. Look at it.
[00:03:34] Ben: I love it. Keep doing that.
[00:03:37] Michelle: I love it. I lean into it. I think it’s phenomenal, especially like the themes and the templates that are in there to kind of jump start things for you. But how do you define Kadence? If somebody said to you, well, what’s Kadence? What’s your answer to that question?
[00:03:53] Ben: Yeah, I get why it’s hard. I like to say that we’re a suite of products that help you build effective websites. So that’s the sales pitch, but also it is what, at the core of what we’re trying to do, we want people to be able to build effective websites so that they convert, that they’re fast. And so we think a lot about performance of your website. How well is it designed? Does it engage your audience? And how do you get those customers to convert to subscribers, paid users and things like that? So those are kind of the three.
There’s obviously accessibility in the whole realm of that when you’re talking about design as well as the layout of the content. So that’s the suite of products. It’s not one product, though. It is several different products. And there are multiple ways into the Kadence universe. You can start with our Kadence theme, which is where a lot of people start. They install the theme from the directory, then you get into starter templates, and from there you get a website built for you. And then you are using blocks, Kadence blocks that handle the page building part of that.
And then there’s other people who come in through blocks, and they just are using Gutenberg already and they want more tools, more extensibility inside the block-based editor. So then they come to Kadence to say, oh, I want to be able to do accordions, or I want to be able to do something fancy, maybe animation in the page. So that’s the suite.
We wouldn’t consider ourselves a page builder because typically when people are talking about page builders, you’re talking about something that is outside of what core is doing in the typical post and page editor. And so we’re not overriding that. We’re building tools for that to make that core editor much more of a design tool rather than just like a basic content editing tool.
[00:05:55] Michelle: So it’s better than a page builder?
[00:05:58] Ben: Well, I mean, there’s different ways to look at it, for sure. Like page builders obviously can own the entire experience and there’s something really elegant to that. There also can be front end focused, meaning that you’re developing on the front end of your website, whereas WordPress core, you develop in like a page editing experience, which is technically different than what the front end is, although in recent years that has become closer and closer and closer to what is actually on the front end. But there are some differences there for sure. And there’s some scenarios where people are like, “give me that page builder. I really want that page builder experience.”
It does come with some downsides. Like you need to hope that your page builder is around a long time and you also need to worry about performance in some different ways.
[00:06:45] Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. So when somebody says, what is Kadence? You can basically say, what do you want it to be? Because it can do that.
[00:06:52] Ben: I mean, it’s a tool to help you build effective websites in WordPress. And a tool just comes with different tools.
[00:07:01] Michelle: Awesome. Very cool.
[00:07:04] Delka: So can you tell us what Kadence AI is and how it works?
[00:07:08] Ben: Yeah. So one of the main things that Kadence tries to help with is when you open up a brand new website or a new page, you are greeted with a white screen of decision. What do I do now? How do I make this look pretty? And what we want to get away from is you just starting to write some. Like, you write a headline in and you write a paragraph and then you go and look on the front end, you get very discouraged about how bad that looks and you then abandon your attempt to build a website. And what we want to do is we want to say, let’s get you started and let’s make adding more content to your website easier. And we’re going to use the power of AI to be able to help you do that. So what AI does is it allows us to get a profile from you. You give us your name and some information about what it is you’re doing, whether it’s for yourself or for a company. And then we go and generate some text, some contextually based text, like what would an about look like? We get some text for that. And what would products and services look like? Or value proposition or a call to action. We get all that text from the AI and then we take that with our library. We have over 600 different patterns of layouts and we put that text into those layouts along with images that are specific to your business or you, or even your own images. You can give us your own images and we’ll insert that in. And then we give you a bunch of layouts with that text and those images to then decide with real text examples and real image examples, what do I want? And so then you can kind of pick and choose a website that’s been generated with your stuff and get started from there. And then once you’ve picked, if you’re going through the starter templates, AI wizard, you’re picking out the website and then you drop right in. Here’s your whole website done for you. And the idea is that it’s a lot easier to edit a website than to create a new one. And it’s a lot easier to edit a page and create a new one. And what’s so hard is when you hit that white screen and you’re like, I don’t know what to do next. This just jump starts it. Let’s say it gets you 80% there. The content is going to be perfect because AI is not perfect. And to get AI to give us perfect, it’s a real iterative approach. So the idea is let’s get you 80% there and then you can just edit and you already have some examples so it can spring that in your mind. It’s like, oh, I hadn’t thought about needing this section, but now that I see this section on my site, I really like that I’m going to tweak the text so it’s a little bit more of what I want. But I actually think that section is needed and it’ll help you when you’re like, I don’t know even what goes on my home page. A lot of these homepages are designed to give you the sections that you need on most sites. So a hero is really how you should start. What is it that you’re trying to get people to do when they come to your website? Then you’ve got value proposition. What’s the value add here. And then you’ve got testimonials and we put all that into these layouts and you just pick a site. It’s got all that for you and you’re just editing. And so the idea is we’re using AI to just really jumpstart what you’re doing outside of jump starting. If you’re like, hey, I’ve already got a site and I want to use AI. You can definitely do that. You just go right into the page editor. You can add sections using our pre built design library inside of the editor, and you can even say, like, I need help generating a headline for this. You can use our AI tool in line and say, generate a headline about a blog post or whatever it is I’m doing. Generate a headline for me about this sale I’m doing, and it can do that for you. So it’s kind of a mix of different places, but the idea is all around, how do we help you get to that 80%? Because it’s really not about doing it for you. It’s a tool to help you build your site, not a tool to build it for you completely.
[00:11:22] Michelle: That’s really cool. Now, I am a longtime user of WS Form, and last year they actually added an AI part of it. So I can type in a block and say, give me a form that does these things and it’ll actually create the form for me. Then I can edit it similar to what you’re saying – it’s going to create something. But I had to sign up for an account on Chat GPT, and I had to put a credit card in. So even though I think I’ve spent so far like 0.8 cents, I had to have some way to pay for that because it’s not expensive, right? I mean, if you’re using it all day, every day, of course it’s going to start to rack up, but it’s not expensive to do some small things like that. How is Kadence AI accommodating for the cost associated with generating things through AI?
[00:12:08] Ben: Yeah, so we created a credit system, and basically, like you said, it’s not expensive, but we do get charged. And when you have 400,000 active installs on Kadence blocks, if you think about all these people starting to use it, that’s going to be, and then the potential for abuse and all that stuff. So we created a credit system. You get 250 credits if you’re a free user, and then depending on whatever, if you’re a pro user, what license you got, which tier you get more credits. And so that’s a system largely for us, just to make sure that it doesn’t get abused and it protects us from that. It’s really intended to be generous and not something you have to go in and add more credits all the time or pay for, because the system is, like you said, cheap. So we give users 250 credits. That’s enough to generate three websites unique to you, plus doing some inline content. So it’s not like it’s a forced paywall thing or something, that’s going to be like, oh, one more added cost to this whole process. It’s built in. And the idea is, unless you’re building a ton of websites for people, you shouldn’t run out of credits.
[00:13:30] Michelle: Yeah, or you’re the New York Times and you’re using it for every post, for example, something like that. That makes sense. Delka, do you have another question?
[00:13:39] Delka: Yeah, so I was wondering, with the way that everyone is using AI now, and it’s obviously becoming something that’s being frequented, how do you think AI is changing the landscape for tech and web development?
[00:13:53] Ben: Yeah, I’m not too concerned about AI as being this job killer.
I still really see it as a tool, and I think it’s going to help elevate workers. So most of the time when technology comes in and it seems like it’s really disruptive, what it does is it makes workers have to grow their skill set and jump to the next level, because that menial task is no longer needed. But there’s still a need for human interaction and intuition and all of that. And so this is a tool. And how many times do you do a lot of simple math anymore? You just don’t because you have a calculator.
Spelling has become a thing that’s like if you get it close, you’re good enough, because all the spell checkers and everything else, it’s one of those things for me, it’s a new tool, it’s going to benefit us and help us with suggestions as we’re writing and all that stuff. It’s going to be a great brainstorming tool, but it still needs human interaction. And what it means for us is that we can spend less of our brain power focusing on some of this menial stuff and some of these things that we would traditionally spend a lot of time trying to tweak, wording and all that stuff. Now we can spend more time thinking about and elevating, even elevating our offering. When we think about agency work, like if you’re a solopreneur who’s building websites for small companies and different things like that.
The brochure website that you were building that didn’t have any SEO value and didn’t have any marketing value, where you were really helping that business to make money, you were just giving them a presence online.
That person now needs to start thinking like, I have to elevate. I have to be able to not just sell, here’s your presence online because you need a website and actually sell them. Here’s how I can help you build a website that will work for you, that will increase your revenue, that will do more than just be a site that no one sees because it’s never found and no one goes to, but will actually engage with an audience and increase your revenue. And I think if I were building websites today, I would say you should really focus on learning marketing, learning SEO, learning ad spend, those are the tools that will really give you that value add. Because just generating layouts and design, that’s going to be more menial. And design is tricky. I understand that there are various levels of design and even just this week, Kadence had a meeting where we brainstormed design with the context of what is our brand design, what should it actually mean, feel like, and do? And that’s another level of design, right? That’s where you’re really thinking about how are we going to speak to our user base versus like, oh, that’s pretty, I’ll pick that. And that is a value add to brands. But there are many of those smaller brochure sites that they can’t afford and nor should they spend money on that level of branding at this point. They just need to make a website that starts bringing them traffic to their, whether it’s phone calls or emails or sales. And I think if you’re building for that kind of customer, what’s coming is I need to start thinking about how much this is going to make that process easier and then what I can do to elevate this customer’s website or whatever.
Yeah, go ahead. I’m talking way too long, I’m sure.
[00:17:47] Michelle: No, you made me think of something. So there are people who just need to own their URL and you search it and you type it in and it says, this is parked at this hosting company or this is parked at this hosting company. Using Kadence AI would allow you to have a splash page up there, whatever we’re calling it. Splash page now, right? A home page that says, this is us. At the very least, this is how to get in touch with us and this is what we do. So there’s a restaurant in Rochester that is well known in the area. We have something here called a garbage plate. If you don’t know what a garbage plate is, come visit me in Rochester. I will take you out for a garbage plate. I’ll put a link in the show notes. People can see what a garbage plate is. It is our local cuisine. It is a heart attack on a plate. It is the best hangover food you’ve ever had in your entire life. That said, the place that originated it has a home page that is entirely HTML. It’s not mobile responsive at all.
It literally just says, come buy the food, come eat here. We’re not giving you any other information. That’s it. And I could think, man, if they just had Kadence AI, it would be a little more appetizing.
So there is definitely, even if you’re not building the New York Times, you’re not building Amazon, you’re not looking to build a site that’s going to be generating a ton of revenue, at least own your site, own your URL, your domain, and have something there that represents you. So easy to do.
[00:19:12] Ben: Yeah, exactly.
[00:19:13] Michelle: Makes a lot of sense. So what do you see as the future for Kadence? As we like, we’re incorporating AI now. I know that we never just go, okay, we’re done. We’re walking away from this product now. What are things that you can tell us that might be coming down the road.
[00:19:26] Ben: In the roadmap, for sure? Yeah, I think that is the challenge because I’m always like, six, three months out. Six months out, thinking of like, we’ll get this out, we’ll get this out. Never can really, like, yeah, we did.
[00:19:39] Michelle: This, but let’s just celebrate today.
[00:19:43] Ben: Yeah, I think with Kadence, we’re focused on advanced navigation right now in WordPress. If you want to build a header navigation menu that’s got a mega menu and just a lot more interesting and engaging navigation, which is arguably one of the more important parts of your website.
It’s not a great user experience, especially in full site editing. It’s a very miserable user experience in full site editing. So what we’re looking to do is build a much more powerful navigation block that will work great in full site editing and then also for a lot of our users who are building their homepage in blocks, using elements and templating.
So that’s like a big item on our roadmap that we’ve already kind of done a lot of pre work on and we’re getting into. And then another thing that’s specific to AI is how do we do more iterative work with our AI. So right now it’s pretty basic. We send it some stuff, it sends us back some stuff. And if you’ve done a lot with AI or with chatGPT or whatever, some of the best things are. When you ask, it responds and you then say, well, not quite that. And the AI has the context for that kind of conversation to then pull from. And you say, actually, I want it to be like this. And you kind of give it some feedback and results get better and better. And so what we want to do is create some kind of a system like that where you could build a page, so we’re calling it like an AI page wizard. And with that you could come in and say, I want to build a page about this and give us some details, and then we give you some layouts and examples. Okay, this is kind of what you’re thinking and then your feedback to that, which would be like, I like this, but I want to add a section or take out a section and I want this section to be more like this. So you give us some feedback and then we send that back to the AI and then come back to where you go through a couple of steps and then you have a page. And let’s say that page is still not 100% there, but instead of 80, now it’s 90-95% there.
And you’ve had that iterative work where you’ve been able to feel like, I worked with the AI, we saw some different stuff and I selected into this is what I want. I think that’s really an interesting area for us and we want to kind of explore and build that out as well as similarly with a blog post. Definitely don’t want to get a place where it’s like we’ll just generate a bunch of blog posts for you because that’s usually just a way to get your site lower ranked when you have these crappy blog posts. But again, that iterative work of I want to write a blog post about this and here’s what I think for an outline. And then it gives you some suggestions on an outline and you kind of say, oh, I didn’t think about that. Let’s add that section. Yes, but I want to take out this section and you work through an outline with an AI and then you work through your first draft. That to me could be some interesting work where again, it’s a little bit more iterative and it’s in a wizard experience. And then you drop that into your posts and you start doing that final work. So that’s kind of what we’re looking at right now.
Someone was asking me the day, like, what are you doing in five years? And I was like, I have no idea.
[00:23:16] Michelle: What do any of us know?
[00:23:20] Ben: I don’t even have a clue what we’ll be doing in five years because this stuff changes so fast. But I am definitely excited about the next six months. And I think that there’s some really interesting stuff as we go forward. And just think about the different ways that AI can be really helpful as a tool is exciting to me.
[00:23:43] Michelle: What’s interesting, too, about AI, when you started talking about it, it gives you 80% of it, which I think is perfect because that 20% humanity needs to be baked in. You need to own it. It isn’t just robotic, it needs to be something that actually speaks to humans.
And you can tell, I think, nowadays when somebody just generates something through AI and they put that out there, I saw something. I’m not going to out the person, but I saw something the other day. Somebody was writing an article about me and what they put in the first two paragraphs made it sound like they said, pretend she’s the queen of England and talk about her. Because every flowery phrase that you could possibly think of to flatter me was in that. And while I was flattered, I also recognized this person did not pen every single one of those words on their own. So I agree. I think whatever comes back from AI, you have to infuse humanity into it. Otherwise people are just going to go, oh, that’s so not real. That’s not real. And so you need to put your own personality and your brand into it as well. And AI can’t read your brand. You need to make sure that things are infused with your voice and your brand voice. I think that’s really important.
[00:24:53] Ben: And your personality.
[00:24:54] Michelle: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:55] Ben: When you think about the success of websites, especially if we think for a second just about blog posts and writers and stuff like that, their success comes when they show their work. They’re really proud of that work. And others catch on like there’s some personality, some depth, something interesting, and that begins to get shared and shared and shared, and that’s how you’re successful. It’s not through a massive amount of blog posts that you’re neither proud of and no one else is interested in.
[00:25:27] Michelle: Exactly. It’s almost today’s version of keyword stuffing.
[00:25:35] Ben: Yeah.
[00:25:35] Michelle: Delka, do you have any other questions about AI or Kadence or any of the things that are happening at Stellar.
[00:25:45] Delka: Not off the top of my head now.
[00:25:46] Michelle: That’s fine, I just want to make sure I’m not cutting you off, because I do want to ask Ben if there’s anything else that you want to share with our audience about anything that’s happening at Stellar or with Kadence.
Is there a question I didn’t ask that you wish I had so you could answer it?
[00:26:00] Ben: I think just in terms of current WordPress and Mullenweg’s State of the Word, of content liberation or data liberation, I do think that there’s some interesting things happening there that I’m curious how Stellar can get involved with, can potentially do more stuff where we think in terms of how do we get our stuff easy to export and how do we also get stuff easy to import from other sources. I’m very curious personally about how we can use AI to help with that and make that process of not thinking about tool to tool, but thinking about basically AI to whatever it is that you’re going to learn AI deeply.
[00:26:50] Michelle: Was it this year he said learn AI deeply?
[00:26:52] Ben: Yes.
[00:26:53] Michelle: Was it learn Javascript deeply back in 2018 and this year it’s learn AI deeply?
[00:26:58] Ben: Yeah.
And I think that that’s all super interesting, that AI could potentially scrape and put together in a way that’s easy to import into all kinds of different patterns. That to me is really interesting and a cool way to do and to think about data liberation.
[00:27:22] Michelle: With the new wave of the ways that they’re restructuring a lot of WordPress events. So not everything is just WordCamp region. It’s not going to be too long before we see like WordCampAI, I think. And then we’re all going to be “let me go to Chat GPT to write my topic idea.” Really make an inception, right?
[00:27:44] Ben: Yep.
[00:27:44] Michelle: That’s awesome. Well, how do people find out more about you if they’re interested in touching base with you? How do they find out more about, you know, websites, social media, et cetera? We’re going to include all this in the show notes.
[00:27:58] Ben: Yeah, I’m not super great on social media.
I know, kind of a ghost. I’m there, but you can come follow me on Twitter, but I haven’t tweeted in a while. You can come follow me on Facebook, but in general, the one I’m most engaged in, and that’s still not that much, but it is where I go, and that is the Kadence community Facebook group that is just a lot of really engaged people helping people with websites, WordPress all of it. And so that’s really fun.
[00:28:37] Michelle: Hannah helps with that a lot, right? Hannah’s over in there talking to people all the time.
[00:28:40] Ben: Hannah, my sister’s in there a lot. We have multiple people on our team that are in there a lot.
So that’s a great spot.
And then, of course, if you want to find out more about Kadence, it’s also a great spot to go there. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram.
This is not public yet, but we’re doing some work to maybe up our real game and get into TikTok. So in the future, that might be a place you find more things about Kadence. And then obviously our website, KadenceWP.com.
[00:29:17] Michelle: Absolutely, we’ll have all of that in the show notes. So if you’re listening to this somewhere, go to stellarwp.com slash podcast. Find this episode about Kadence AI with Ben, and we will have all of the links in there, as well as a transcript of today’s conversation.
Delka, thank you so much for co-hosting with me. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit more. And Ben, as always, thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing with, you know, learning more about Kadence. Even though I work here, you just dropped some knowledge on me that I hadn’t heard yet because, of course, I’m not in it in Kadence all day, every day.
So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you both.
[00:29:57] Ben: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:29:59] Michelle: We’ll see everybody on the next episode of WP Constellations. Thanks.
WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at StellarWP.com.