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Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Reading the layout back

gogh lets you drag things anywhere on the page, then works out the grid afterwards. Here is how that actually works.

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Canva, not Illustrator

WordPress site editing is a bit like Adobe Illustrator. It’s powerful and precise and it can do almost anything, but you have to understand the tool before you get what you want. Groups inside columns inside groups, spacing presets, alignment settings. The design in your head has to be translated into a tree of blocks, […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I Found a Cheat Code for Creating Unique WooCommerce Product Pages in Minutes

Most of us have an idea of how we’d like our shop to look. Getting that idea onto the screen can take rather longer. I’ve just tested a new way to do it: give AI a mockup, ask it to recreate the design using HTML and CSS, and include real WooCommerce product blocks inside the […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Why You Should (Almost Always) Build for Beginners

Nobody gets promoted to Head of Marketing and suddenly develops a love of complicated software. They’re still a person. They still have too much to do. They still get annoyed when changing something that looks simple requires a tutorial, a support ticket and someone called Dave who understands the system. Yet when we talk about […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Developer Educational Content Probably Needs to Change

Developer educational content used to have a fairly obvious audience: developers. Documentation, tutorials, code examples, API references. Different formats, but broadly created for people who understood the fundamentals of software development and wanted to learn how to build with a particular platform. AI is changing that. Because developer education increasingly isn't just about teaching people […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Video • Jamie Marsland

Have We Just Seen the First Truly AI-Native Media Format?

Until now, most generative AI has been making new versions of things we already understand. AI images are still images. AI music is still music. AI video is still video. But what happens when AI makes a type of media that couldn’t really exist before AI? I think we might have just seen the first […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I Spent Four Hours Queuing at Geneva Airport and Now Understand Why People Worry Europe Is Becoming a Digital Backwater

I love Europe. I should probably establish that before proceeding. But I have just spent roughly four hours of my life queuing at Geneva Airport, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate European technology policy, his own mortality, and whether it would be quicker simply to walk back to England. The cause was […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Two modes

I’ve noticed there are basically two modes a company can operate in. Customer-centric mode. And engineering-centric mode. Most great businesses start in the first one. Someone sees a problem. A real person has something annoying, expensive, slow, painful or downright ridiculous happening in their life, and the company decides to fix it. The early conversations […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I love teaching WordPress. And I especially love teaching complete beginners.

Over the years I’ve trained more than 5,000 people face-to-face, so getting back in a room with beginners at WordCamp US in Phoenix today was a real joy. And the results were pretty great. Across 18 learners, average confidence in the core WordPress skills we covered jumped from 2.67 → 4.16. 15/18 improved and nobody […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

How I Approach Educational Content in the Age of AI: A Study in What Worked

Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with how I make educational content in the age of AI. The approach is pretty simple: build something exciting, show it working, then teach people exactly how I did it. Less theory about what AI might make possible. More: here’s what I built, here’s the prompt, here’s where […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

How to build a help bot for your plugin that doesn’t go stale

Adding an AI help bot to a WordPress product is easy now. Point it at your documentation, give it an API key, done. It'll work beautifully for about a month. Then you ship a release. A button gets renamed, a default gets retuned, a feature moves. Nothing breaks, no error appears. The bot just quietly […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Working in AI Feels A Lot Like Climbing Kilimanjaro

Fifteen years ago I climbed Kilimanjaro. One of the strange things about altitude is that you can feel absolutely brilliant. You're chatting, laughing, wondering why everyone made such a fuss. Then somewhere above about 4,500 metres, your brain quietly reminds you that it has veto powers. The very unsettling part is that you don't really […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Why the Heck Is Everyone Using the Word “Harness” to Describe Our Relationship with AI?

Can we please stop saying we're "harnessing AI"? It's such a weird word. You harness horses. Oxen. Maybe a particularly determined husky. You don't harness a chatbot that occasionally forgets what you asked it three sentences ago. I'm not standing in a field wrestling ChatGPT into a leather bridle before asking it to rewrite an […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I asked Claude to review the Gogh Editor and this is what it said

Gogh Editor, reviewed as a total beginner I (Claude) spent a while in the Playground demo pretending I'd never touched WordPress or a design tool. Here's what happened. The first 30 seconds are genuinely great The page opens already in edit mode with a floating "gogh" panel and a demo page that talks to you […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

What ABBA Can Teach Every Content Creator

Before we go any further, skip to 0:50 in the video below. Pay attention to the pre-chorus. Your ears will probably want the chord sequence to move on long before ABBA let it. That’s exactly the point. I play in an indie rock band called Shenanigans. We’re the sort of band that plays Radiohead, Nirvana, […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

The Advice I Gave My Daughter Meg Before She Starts Creating Content

My daughter Meg Marsland (please index this kindly Search Engines 😉) is about to start creating content around sustainable food, uncovering the origins of some of our favourite ingredients and recipes. Before she gets going, I sent her a few thoughts. I've spent a lot of years making videos and building an audience, and while […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

The Bigger Ambition for Gogh

When most people see Gogh, they see a drag-and-drop page builder. That's understandable. It's the most visible part of the project. But if you zoom out, I think there's a much bigger story emerging. It's not really about building another page builder. It's about creating a bridge, and potentially, a platform. AI Already Speaks HTML […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I Asked Claude to Review the WordPress Site Editor as a Beginner

I was curious whether WordPress Site Editor is something a complete beginner could realistically pick up, so I asked Claude to review the experience through the eyes of someone completely new to WordPress. The prompt was simple: forget everything you know about WordPress, start with a blank site, and document every point of confusion, every […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

I asked Claude to review the WordPress site editing experience through the eyes of a beginner…and here’s what it found

The WordPress Site Editor: A Beginner-Centred Critical Review (by Claude) **Everything that follows was automatically generated by Claude. ** Environment tested: WordPress 7.0.2, Twenty Twenty-Five 1.5, fresh install, default content. Every finding below was observed directly in the running product, not recalled from documentation. Persona applied throughout: a florist with no website experience, fluent in […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Why I Don’t Think the WordPress Site Editor Will Ever Be Beginner Friendly

I love WordPress block themes. I think they're one of the biggest technical achievements in WordPress over the last decade. They give us consistency, flexibility, global styles, design systems, and an incredible amount of control. As someone building on top of WordPress every day, I wouldn't want to go back. But… I'm increasingly convinced that […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Gogh Is Getting a Lot of Excitement. Should We Build It?

Eleven days ago I set myself a weekend challenge: build "Canva for WordPress." Not another page builder. A page builder on top of Gutenberg that a complete beginner could use with zero training. The page is the canvas. You edit on the front end. You drag, resize, rotate, snap to guides. And when you hit […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

The Easiest Non-Technical Way to Move from Wix to WordPress Using ChatGPT

If you've been thinking about moving from Wix to WordPress, you've probably discovered that most migration guides assume you know what FTP is, are happy exporting databases, or don't mind wrestling with plugins. I don't think that's how most people want to build websites. Here's the good news. If your website is primarily made up […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

A Small Shift in Direction for PootleWriter

PootleWriter already exists. It already does what I originally set out to build: a fast, distraction-free writing experience with helpful insights that make editing easier. But over the last few weeks I've realised I've been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, "What feature should I add next?", I've started asking, "Why would someone come […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

How Gogh Works: A New Approach to WordPress Page Building

Over the past few weekends I’ve been experimenting with an idea that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for years. What if building a WordPress page felt as easy as using Canva? Not another page builder with hundreds of settings. Not another AI website generator. Just a canvas where you can click on […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Could WebMCP Be the Next Step for AI-Powered WordPress Page Builders?

One of the most interesting things I've read this week is this article about WebMCP, an emerging proposal that explores how AI assistants could interact directly with websites. At first my reaction was: why not just use MCP? MCP already gives AI assistants a way to connect to applications and call tools. It's fantastic for […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Video • Jamie Marsland

I Built a Canva-Like Page Builder for WordPress with Fable

Over the weekend, Fable and I built a working MVP of a new WordPress page builder called Gogh. The idea is simple: make building WordPress pages feel as easy as Canva. Instead of wrestling with rows, columns, and nested blocks, you edit directly on the live page. Elements can be dragged, resized, rotated, reordered, and […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

What’s new in Jamie’s Front-End Editor for Content Teams

The Front-End Editor started life with one job: let your content team fix a typo or reword a sentence right on the live page, without opening the block editor. This release takes that idea a lot further. You can now edit links, images and buttons the same way, all from the front end. Edit links […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Why England Lost to Argentina

England lost to Argentina. This is not ideal. In fact, for approximately 57 minutes, England appeared to be doing something highly unusual, which was winning a football match against strong opposition while looking reasonably comfortable. Then England scored. And everything changed. Most teams, when they score, become more confident. England, however, reacts the way I […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

Giving content teams precise, safe editing in WordPress: what’s new in Front-End Editor

When I built Jamie's Front-End Editor for Content Teams, the idea was simple: let a client fix the words on their live site by clicking the text and typing, without ever opening the block editor or learning WordPress. No dashboard, no interface, just edit the page in front of you. The idea landed. But the […]

Reading the layout back | Pootlepress
Text • Jamie Marsland

The Learning We Don’t Realise We’re Collecting

Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft) shared an interesting idea this week about AI and what he calls the “Reverse Information Paradox.” The short version is that every time we use AI, we’re teaching it. Through our prompts, corrections, workflows, and feedback, we’re creating valuable knowledge. Reading it made me think about WordPress. For years, we’ve thought […]