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Navigating the Digital Evolution with David Martin
52 Plays1 year ago
Step back in time with Andrew Laws and David Martin as they transport listeners to the dawn of their digital marketing careers in 1998. Hailing from Indiana, USA, David Martin isn't just any guest; he's a seasoned designer, developer, and web host with a wealth of knowledge and stories to share.
Together, Andrew and David embark on a nostalgic journey, reminiscing about the early challenges they faced, the triumphs they celebrated, and the lessons they learned along the way.
But this episode isn't just about looking back. The duo also delves deep into the present and future of technology. They discuss the monumental changes they've witnessed over the years, from the rise of e-commerce to the current twilight zone of declining social media.
As the conversation evolves, they touch upon a topic that's on everyone's mind: the role of Artificial Intelligence in shaping the future of digital marketing.
Join Andrew and David for a riveting conversation filled with personal anecdotes, expert insights, and a shared enthusiasm for the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out in the world of digital marketing, this episode promises a blend of inspiration, reflection, and forward-thinking discussions.
Say hello to David at https://davidmartindesign.com/
Find David on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/david-martin-design/
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Transcript
Season Two Kickoff
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO podcast. It's been a while, hasn't it? Unless you've never heard us before, in which case, hey, this is brand new and we're very prompt. This is the start of season two, and we're going to run things a little differently this season. Season one was me speaking to people who I already knew
00:00:17
Speaker
had something really interesting to say about SEO or the world of digital marketing. In a lot of cases, these are people I know in person. But for season two, I thought I would play on a trope about people who are involved in digital marketing that we all sit at home by ourselves not talking to anybody else. So season two is active networking.
00:00:39
Speaker
you're going to get a chance to listen to me speaking to interesting people as we get to know each other. And I'm quite honored to have somebody not from these shores, these shores being the UK, as my first guest.
Meet David Martin
00:00:53
Speaker
So honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, thank you very much, Andrew. I appreciate you having me on here and inviting me. My name is David Martin. I'm the founder, operator of David Martin Design. And like many of us in digital marketing wear many hats. I specialize in WordPress web design, web hosting, SEO, and providing my clients with digital marketing services.
00:01:27
Speaker
My mission is to deliver personalized websites that not only meet the unique needs of my clients, but also help them carve a distinctive identity in the bustling. Okay, nevermind. I mean, that just sounds like boilerplate. AI just wrote that for me. That's such a hot topic at the moment in our world, isn't it?
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't really talk like that, so I shouldn't really write like that.
The Authenticity of AI Content
00:01:55
Speaker
But yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I like to keep up with the trends. AI is great, but sometimes it's garbage in, garbage out. It's a very good point. It's a bit uncanny valley, isn't it? It sounds a little bit like something you've heard before and a little bit human, but just not quite right.
00:02:17
Speaker
Right, so David, I really want to dive into a few things with you around SEO and hosting actually, because I know that you are a cPanel hosting expert. I should just stay at this junction for our listeners. This podcast
00:02:30
Speaker
We're aiming more at peers and other professionals rather than previous podcasts, which was aimed at business owners and people with SEO responsibilities. So if you're listening, you're one of us. You're part of our gang, and I'm very pleased to have you here. So we're going to talk some tech, but before we do, I've got one question that I really need an answer to.
The Rise of Pickleball
00:02:50
Speaker
What is pickleball? Pickleball.
00:02:57
Speaker
It's a combination of badminton, racquetball, tennis, and ping pong kind of all mixed together. You play on a outdoor or indoor court. It's about the third of the size of a tennis court.
00:03:17
Speaker
and it's the fastest growing sport in the world. Wow, I've never heard of it. So are you quite active on the pickleball scene? Actually, I played two hours this morning. I try to play almost every day.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. Yes, very much so. Right, so the second thing. Now, a gentleman shouldn't ask another gentleman his age, but I'm guessing we're either roughly the same age, or I am a little bit older than you. And I'm happy to say to anyone who's not seen what I look like, it's because I have bright white hair. And actually, I have missing tooth at the moment, which makes me look even older, somehow.
00:03:56
Speaker
I'm not saying you look old, you look great, but I'm guessing we might be, I'm going to say mid to late thirties for you. Oh, well, thank you. That's generous. Uh, 40, I had to think about that for a second. 42, 42, 43 coming up soon. Yeah. All this, uh, white hair. I have two kids, you know, so that's how, how that works. White hair just kind of grows and grows and grows as your kids get older.
00:04:25
Speaker
So yeah, I'm, you know, I can't remember how old I I'm either I'm either 46 or 47. It stops mattering. I asked my 12 year old daughter how old I was the other day. And she just looked at me like an idiot. But then that's kind of the standard setting at the moment when you've got a 12 year old, you'd say anything like, would you like loads of chocolate? And you get the look at you like you're the worst kind of stupidest human being that's ever existed. But yeah, hey, I get that from the mirror as well sometimes. So that's fine.
00:04:53
Speaker
Oh, you're so hard on yourself. No, I think it's a nice, distinguished look. Cool.
David's Tech Beginnings
00:04:58
Speaker
Right. So you say you've been in tech for a long time. What first drew you to it? I mean, what I find is that people who are the senior generation or the more experienced or just the people who've had more fun like us, none of us really aimed to be in it. We fell into it. Would that be a fair assumption for you?
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think as soon as I tried to build my first website,
00:05:26
Speaker
I was just like, wow, this is so fun. This is so exciting. I can copy and paste, save the file, change it, upload it, and I can go over to this other computer here and still access it. How does this work? This is so cool. I remember the first time saving an HTML file, uploading it to my school server,
00:05:51
Speaker
refreshing my browser and I really felt like it was magic. And so from that point on, I did it just for fun. And as a hobby,
00:06:03
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I, I at that time in 1999, 1998, when I built my first website, there was not the digital marketing field that exists today. And so I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew that it was going to be in something, uh, creative, something in the,
00:06:27
Speaker
like gaming world or technology. I mean, I grew up with an Atari. That was my very first gaming system. Wow.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, it was a great time to grow up 1980. Yeah, we are not only a similar age, but I started out in 98 as well. And I can remember publishing my first website and I felt like I was a god until I looked at it on somebody else's computer. And then I made the first mistake that everyone back then used to make when building a website. And that was to source the images to your own hard drive.
00:07:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah. The amount of times in the early days you go to someone's website and the image will be broken and you'd right click to see what the path was and it'd be like C colon backside. Yeah, I made a lot of mistakes. Definitely. I did some things right. My very first website was for a class project to celebrate the 1960s.
00:07:21
Speaker
So I had all these really cool trippy psychedelic backgrounds on every single page. It was a little different, which I probably wouldn't do that nowadays. I'd love to see it. I sometimes wonder whether the web's been around long enough now that we're going to have a retro fashion and people will start putting web counters and web rings on their sites again.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I like to go back to archive.org and use the Wayback Machine and show people that. And exactly what you're talking about with linking to the images, I should have saved all of those music band images like Elvis and like
00:08:05
Speaker
I don't know, all the cool 1960s music. I had a page just dedicated for that and I had like CD covers and stuff on it, but like two of those images still work. Wow. Yeah. So as we were saying, because we both got into digital marketing, it wasn't something, you know, here in the UK, we have what we call the careers
University and E-commerce Journey
00:08:26
Speaker
office. I think in America, you'd possibly call them careers counselors. Is that right? Or somewhere you go to at school and they say, what do you want to do? And you have to tell them, do you have something like that?
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think I was more self-motivated on my lunch break, go into the library, and I felt like I had special access knowing the librarian pretty well, and then they let me come back in the special library room and use the computer that had Flash on it. The one computer with Flash.
00:09:03
Speaker
Exactly, the one computer. And so that was really cool feeling like you had a little bit of special access. But yeah, that's what I did on my lunch break. It was not, I didn't go talk to my friends, you know, I was kind of
00:09:17
Speaker
I had a lot of friends. I was kind of a chameleon and fit into a lot of different places. I was in band and baseball and very well rounded, but I'm always been drawn to screens. I've always been drawn to technology and the web was just
00:09:38
Speaker
amazing to come along at that time. And I remember in high school sitting down in my stepdad showing me Google for the first time. Wow. Yeah. And ripping a Dave Matthews band. Sorry, Dave Matthews, but trust me, I've spent lots of money on Dave Matthews.
00:10:02
Speaker
I ripped the MP3 right there and I remember that for the first time and being at Indiana University when Napster came along and going to listen to Sean Parker come speak at the union board talking about copyright law and the legality of all this music and
00:10:24
Speaker
Just growing up in that time was amazing and being in that playground where there's open access and not a lot of commercialization yet. No, there really wasn't. It was such an exciting thing in the early days to see all this, everything's free.
00:10:47
Speaker
kind of mantra. And it really, it was just really exciting. I mean, I'm trying to engage younger people who including those who work with me on the subject, they don't care. So I figure I'll just keep that as something that I think was neat. So you went to you went from high school to university. So what did you study at university?
00:11:08
Speaker
At Indiana University, it's a liberal arts college. So the first year, you get all the requirements out of the way. The freshman year, you live in the dorm. And so it's just general studies the very first year. The second year, I was able to declare a major. And I declared my major as informatics. Wow.
00:11:33
Speaker
I took the first class that Indiana University offered in informatics and that was amazing. I knew that
00:11:46
Speaker
The study of information, taking that class was just mind-blowing. Just understanding that the world can be broken down into just everything can be broken down into bits of information. And just thinking of the world and the surroundings that way, just that's what I studied. But I ended up leaving Indiana University
00:12:13
Speaker
Um, and it was a tumultuous time. I knew that I wasn't going to make it through all four years of college. Uh, and Bobby Knight got fired. So I was really upset. I'm not sure if you know, uh, across the pond who Bobby Knight is, but, um, he is a historical figure in college sports. Uh,
00:12:42
Speaker
the one of the most winningest coaches of all time in college basketball, really moved the game forward. And here in Indiana, basketball is a religion. And so I grew up here, moved here to Bloomington in fourth grade in 1989, and became a really big IU basketball fan.
00:13:08
Speaker
And from fourth grade on till I went to IU, I went to so many local Indiana games and watched the Hoosiers really play some great games.
00:13:22
Speaker
When their legendary coach got fired because of long story short, he had anger management problems. He's known in the college sports world for throwing a chair across the basketball court. Wow. Definitely looked that up. Well, that gives me something to look up afterwards. So you left university. I mean, did you immediately go into tech or did you kind of find other jobs in other fields?
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, sorry, I'm getting kind of off the track of tech and SEO, but yeah. I was studying computer information systems, computer science, marketing, informatics. It was all kind of in my scope of what I was interested in.
00:14:12
Speaker
I love creativity. I love the aspect of creating something that's helpful and just kind of understanding the world around us and helping connect people. But yeah, I realized that I was going through kind of
00:14:33
Speaker
Some life struggles i was a young kid on my own and making some silly decisions but when bobbie and i got fired i got arrested that night i went to jail my but they let me out of jail but i had to write a paper.
00:14:51
Speaker
on the mob mentality, and it was a great learning experience, but I left the university to raise my family. My son, he's now 21, and then my wife at the time, she continued at IU. And so for the next nine years, I would
00:15:12
Speaker
study, uh, one to two classes per semester. And I finished my two year degree. Wow. And my two year degree, it took me nine years, uh, is from Ivy tech community college. So, uh, that degree is in computer information systems with a web management specialty.
00:15:35
Speaker
That strikes me as a good starting point, especially as back then everything was so brand new. We sort of saw the path I think it was going to take, a lot of us did, but back then there was a lot of people, a lot of peers I had who were getting into it because they wanted to make pretty things basically.
00:15:52
Speaker
And we all realized eventually that it all came down to analytics, it all came down to looking at the data. And it doesn't matter how pretty something is, that you still had to understand what it was actually doing, because prettiness doesn't sell things. So I'm really interested that that was your kind of your starting point there. So what point did you start working for yourself?
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, the prettiness definitely was the draw when I started the 1960s website with all the psychedelic backgrounds. It was just so fun to pick out all that stuff. But yeah, it wasn't semantically correct. It all changed when I read a book Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.
00:16:41
Speaker
I found that book to be just like a switch and it changed me from building these just creative websites to just like completely focusing on the structure and the outline and like building, just turning off the style sheet and focusing on the order of things. And then, yeah, it just,
00:17:10
Speaker
It was an evolution for sure to go from these static websites that really didn't change much. Everybody pretty much had 1024 by 768 monitors or 800 by 600. It was a lot of fun just doing it creatively. But then after high school, while I was in college,
00:17:36
Speaker
I got hired to build an e-commerce website of all the things. Very difficult. Not knowing what I know now, I offered to do that and help this local company. It was a gentleman that I also went to
00:18:01
Speaker
Bloomington North with an alumni of our high school. So it was really nice having a local connection, helping a local business try to set up an e-commerce shop selling urban hip-hop clothing.
00:18:15
Speaker
uh, which was such a niche market too. So I, I felt like now knowing what I know now, uh, cards were kind of stacked against me for success on that first project, but it was a success. No doubt. Like back, back in 2001, having an e-commerce store. That's pretty wild. I've got to say that, that we, we're kind of talking about the past quite a lot, but that, that's, that is wild.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And so I did some research. I had some confidence. I had built some websites before. And actually, that was the thing. I didn't have a lot of confidence. I just knew that I had built some websites before. I had thrown some fun things up there. And so I didn't really think of myself as a web designer.
00:19:06
Speaker
But my first client, Richard Burden, who referred me to this urban hip-hop clothing store, he gave me that confidence. He was like, Dave, you've built websites. You have websites on the internet. You are a web designer. And so I was just like,
00:19:27
Speaker
Okay. I'm a web designer. And I started telling everybody that. It's great to have people like that in your life. I mean, before I got into tech, I used to support adults with learning disabilities.
00:19:40
Speaker
So very, very different world because when I was at high school and they asked, hey, what do you want to do when you when you grow up? I want to be a musician like I am a musician. But they're like, no, seriously, what are you going to do for money? So I ended up kind of on a nursing course. So I was doing I was doing care work and an American friend who just left the forces a few years before that just said, hey, do you want to come work for me? Do I.T. support?
00:20:04
Speaker
And I was like, what do I know about IT? And he's like, you did build your own computer. So I worked with him for a couple of years. But just realizing the big change with you doing an e-commerce website is you had to suddenly deal with databases. And if you've been dealing with static websites before that point, that must have been a bit of a steep learning curve for you.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I didn't get that. I really didn't get that deep into the weeds. I didn't have to go into the database all that much. Actually, I don't even remember looking at tables in the database or anything. I knew nothing about database design or any of that stuff, but OS Commerce was available at that time. That was the best option. It's still a great option.
00:20:51
Speaker
You are kind of limited to the design, the themes that it comes with, but of course now that CSS and other things, it's very flexible and it's still going. It's a great option. I discovered it entirely by accident. I was a web host for a while, and when Soft Delicious came along, I think it was called, and it's still there in C panel, the click to install things.
00:21:18
Speaker
And I was thinking, yeah, I'll have a go at building an e-commerce website. This is probably 2004, 2005. And I'm still really affectionate about OS commerce because I used to have a record shop as well. I was able to build a shop for that and a couple of other ones for little zines like punk magazines and whatever. So I always really like warms my heart when I hear the word OS commerce because I've got so many good memories of it.
Learning Through Open-source Tools
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that having software to play with, having open source tools that you can download,
00:21:53
Speaker
I think that's how I learn best is getting in there and playing with it. We can still do that to bring it right up to date. I was trying to think while you were talking, what are the key moments for me between starting in 1998 and now? What were the big wow moments? The first wow moment
00:22:13
Speaker
was probably c-panel to be honest because i was building service before then using iis the microsoft system and like i mean i was actually building the machines and then driving them to to london to put them on the internet it's very strange so the big yes so
00:22:31
Speaker
c-panel was suddenly like right that's just got a lot easier the next big one was drupal for me when suddenly a realistic cms and then of course we all breathed a sigh of release when wordpress came out we didn't have to deal with drupal anymore but i think we are now in in another cycle of being in the wild west with with ai it's it's so wide open and when i look at you know gbt4 i feel a similar way to
00:22:59
Speaker
You said about the first time you ever looked
Tech Evolution and AI Potential
00:23:01
Speaker
at Google. I remember the first time I looked at the internet, and it was the AOL browser in about 96, and thinking, wow, everything's here. But it's too much. It's too big. Same with Napster. You mentioned Napster. I was like, wow, all the world's music. It's too much. I'm overwhelmed with choice. And I think that's where we potentially are with GPT now. So I know you mentioned that it's something that you've been kind of playing with a lot.
00:23:27
Speaker
I can't believe I was about to say, what do you think of chat GBT? Which is probably like the oldest kind of thing to ask, but everyone's got their own opinion at the moment. Yeah. I don't know. It's really interesting how things have evolved. I go back and my start with the internet,
00:23:54
Speaker
I was watching my stepdad use his IBM 386, 486 DOS 3.1 connecting, loading up CompuServe and dialing up 2400 baud modem
00:24:15
Speaker
and just you know you hear the noise you sit there you connect you see the screen the green monochrome screen update and then you have a bulletin board and you have this online walled garden that people live in and they communicate they send messages back and forth they read the news they
00:24:39
Speaker
do all the things that we're doing still today. So we're still doing the same things. We're still seeking that information and connecting with other people and using it as a utility and an appliance. So I think the nice thing
00:25:01
Speaker
is things have gotten faster and faster and faster. Like you want something. I used to have to go over to my funk and waggles and look it up in my encyclopedia. If I didn't know the answer to it, that was a joke in my family is go look it up in your funk and waggles. That funk and waggles is a good name. Yeah. Well, my stepdad used to sell encyclopedias.
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah, he would go around and sell his funk and waggle. So I was, you know, when you're younger, it was such a treat in your family to have a full set of encyclopedias. Yeah, no kidding. I'd still like one now.
00:25:46
Speaker
You have access to information. You have access to all of this knowledge. But it's a joke now, the amount of information that's available to us now. And the fact that we have AI and all of that accumulated
00:26:05
Speaker
knowledge in all of the encyclopedias and all of the content that's been fed into that is amazing. And the fact that we can query that and it spits back and we can talk to it with our voice and it will talk back with its own voice. And like, it can look, it's just mind blowing where we're at now.
00:26:29
Speaker
But it's not really creating new things. It's creating what we've created before.
00:26:39
Speaker
It's a really good point. I run another podcast called SEO Will Die, and my co-host for that is like, let's say it's an SEO podcast with swearing. The swearing just happens automatically. But in that, my co-host guy called Dan Callis, who's always quite forward thinking, he said, we've been here before. When a new tool comes out that speeds up things and just does more of what we already do, but better, more efficiently, that's lovely.
00:27:06
Speaker
But the real change with AI is when it starts to achieve things that we haven't considered at the moment, when there are, it's the unknowns, it's the what happens next that excites me. Because we've seen it, say, several times. But I think, I can't even say what it is. It's so outside of any context I have. But I think the really cool stuff is not yet with us. It's my opinion anyway.
00:27:35
Speaker
It is definitely new stuff and I'm excited. I think we are definitely into a new age of computing. We are out of the social media phase, which I think that's a good thing. I think the social media phase was really, we've got to the point of
00:28:03
Speaker
the networks have become just so vain and vile and like people have so many flame wars and like the technology is so it's been used in just really negative ways and
00:28:19
Speaker
I know since BBS is since being on CompuServe and AOL that stuff has always been around the flame wars and people hiding behind their screens saying things that they wouldn't say in person and I'm I'm worried about AI and the negative aspects of it as well and how it can be manipulated so
00:28:49
Speaker
I don't know. I love the field. I'm so glad that I chose this field. It's been a really great choice.
00:29:05
Speaker
Timing is everything, like you said, you mentioned COVID before. Going back to Pivotal Moments, for me, one of the Pivotal Moments was in 2010 when I bought indianadesigner.com. Wow, good domain.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, it is a good domain. It's local. Almost all my business has been focused just like Bloomington, Indiana, right here in my city. I figured, okay, maybe I could open it up a little bit more and go statewide. And then, so key words were still important in your domain back then. I still think they kind of are.
00:29:54
Speaker
They are from an SEO perspective. If your company is called, for example, there's a company in the same building here that I founded and sold many years ago, and they're called Best Badgers. So badges here are little metal things, pins, what you might call pins. So yeah, the fact it's got the word badges in the domain helped when I launched the site in 2001.
00:30:15
Speaker
but it still helps now because you will naturally say your own company name multiple times on a website so yeah it's all we always say exact names don't help but your company name will basically. It certainly couldn't hurt and so.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, that was a good domain and I decided at that point not to use my local friend that didn't have a backup for his computer as my web host anymore and especially after it crashed and I had to apologize to a client after spending 40 hours on their family-based website selling jewelry. It was like their
00:30:58
Speaker
business that they launched with their children as like, I just felt so awful. And I was just like, man, I had to write them a letter saying, your website's gone, all that work that we did. And yeah, I felt just awful. So, um, luckily they didn't turn around and like sue me for a bunch of money or anything like that. And, you know, they just took my apology and that was that. But,
00:31:27
Speaker
I just felt awful. I knew that that couldn't happen again.
Building a Hosting Business
00:31:32
Speaker
So that's when I turned in that domain into a web host manager, cPanel instance and started growing my hosting business. Sadly, if you speak to anyone who's been in digital marketing for more than even a short period of time, we learn hard lessons.
00:31:55
Speaker
I wouldn't wish it on anybody at all, anyone who's now getting into tech. I really wish you could avoid those things, but the reality is it's going to happen, it's going to hurt, and it's going to make you so much better at what you do. It really is.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, I find probably we'll build it better the second time anyway. That's very good. Right. So we are unfortunately out of time. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. So how can people find out more about your work? I'll put the link to your website in the show notes.
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, thanks, Andrew. I love talking about myself. It's been really good, though. It's not just about yourself. The way you talk, you paint a picture of a journey that's affected so many of us. And you put it into words in a very, very relatable, very nice way.
00:32:45
Speaker
I normally say these things after I've pressed stop on the recorder, but now I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave us with? Yeah, definitely. If anybody at all is interested in connecting with me, I am available 24-7, just about. Just send me a message, davidmartindesign.com.
Work-life Balance Advice
00:33:12
Speaker
But yeah, I think do what you love.
00:33:15
Speaker
Uh, you know, if you're, if you're stuck, uh, in a rut in your career.
00:33:25
Speaker
I think it's really important to take a look at what you're doing and see if it really matches with what makes you happy. I think it's really important to have good balance, good work-life balance, and really consider working for yourself. I think it's really important to try and take that next step
00:33:54
Speaker
But you have to build it as you're going along. You have to have a hobby while you're working on your main thing. I had to anyway. So, you know, keep grinding every single day. Keep learning. And if anyone wants to talk more about WordPress or web hosting or web design or
00:34:20
Speaker
how to run a small business. Definitely, I'm happy to connect with anybody. Brilliant. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for your time, David. I'm going to say goodbye. Do you want to say goodbye? Goodbye. You just did really well, didn't you? You did really comprehensive. Yeah.