Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY

Guest episode of Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY. Eric and Jake got connected through a mutual client, and Eric has done the schema work on ARTILLERY sites since. In this episode, Jake sits down with Eric Franzon of Smart Data Websites in Missoula, Montana, for the clearest hour on schema markup you'll hear all year. Eric has been working with structured data since 2004, seven years before schema.org existed. He was an Advisory Committee rep at the W3C. He ran the first non-academic conference on commercial semantic technology, and schema.org was announced from that stage in 2011 with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex standing on it together. He has done this work for RAND, Intel, Wondery Podcasts, the official website of The Simpsons, and a labrador breeder in Montana. The story that convinced him it worked for small businesses: 45 minutes of code on his wife's nail salon website, and a month later they cancelled a $1,500 Google AdWords bill. This episode is for business owners who have heard the word schema, maybe flipped it on in an SEO plugin, and never knew whether it was doing anything. In this episode: What schema actually is, in plain English: classes, properties, relationships Why schema is a delivery system for ranking factors rather than a ranking factor itself The $1,500 ad bill a nail salon cancelled after 45 minutes of structured data Where Yoast and Rank Math defaults stop, and why WordPress calls your bio page an "article" Why wrong schema is worse than no schema The three-page, fifteen-minute test with validator.schema.org and Google's Rich Results Test What LLMs do with structured data, and why hallucinations make it matter more The time AI wrote him schema and invented three classes that don't exist About Eric Franzon Eric runs Smart Data Websites, where he builds sites, manages them, and does the structured data work most agencies skip. Twenty-five years in web development, a W3C Advisory Committee seat, and a client list that runs from Fortune 500 brands to one-person shops. He has also taught improv, blues harmonica, early childhood education, and gender studies, and he credits improv for how he explains technical work to non-technical people. His mantra: "The web guy you wish you'd hired in the first place." Smart Data Websites: https://smartdatawebsites.com/ Free 30-minute consult for Slow & Steady listeners: https://smartdataseo.as.me/slowandsteady Email Eric directly: [email protected] Artillery Links Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/ Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia

Guest episode of Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY. This conversation started on Josh Hall's Buy or Sell series in July, and Jake invited Hans on before the mics even cooled off. In this episode, Jake and John sit down with Hans Skillrud, co-founder and VP of Termageddon, the auto-updating website policies and consent solution with over 10,000 agency partners. Hans ran a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago for seven years. While running it, he started dating a privacy attorney and admitted, over dinner, that his clients' privacy policies were copied and pasted from the internet. She's now his wife and co-founder. He sold the agency in 2019 and went all in on Termageddon, and ten years in, the joke of a company name has turned serious: privacy laws are multiplying, and opportunistic attorneys are sending thousands of demand letters to ordinary websites that load trackers without consent. This episode is for anyone whose privacy policy came from a template, a plugin, or ChatGPT, and anyone who wants their website protected while it does its job. In this episode: The dinner confession that turned into a company Why a contact form alone means you're collecting data SIPA: the 30-year-old California wiretap law behind thousands of demand letters What a properly working cookie banner actually does Privacy policy vs. terms of service, in plain English The step most people skip: finding out which laws apply to you The trust case for respecting visitor privacy Support tickets, managing growth, and a farm in Lithuania About Hans Skillrud Hans is the co-founder and Vice President of Termageddon, an auto-updating website policies and consent solution. Before Termageddon, he ran a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago for seven years, then sold it in March 2019 to focus on Termageddon exclusively. His definition of slow and steady: "Managing growth! I never want to lose the level of customer service we provide." Termageddon: https://termageddon.com Artillery Links Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/ Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia

Guest episode of Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY. In this episode, Jake and John sit down with their friend of eight-plus years, Josh Hall. Josh spent a decade building In Transit Studios, his web design agency in Columbus, Ohio. In 2020 he sold it to one of his own students and went all in on teaching. Today he runs Web Designer Pro®, a community of 2,000+ web designers, and hosts the #1 podcast in web design. Josh calls himself an accidental entrepreneur. Metal-band drummer. Cabinet maker. Laid off in 2009. He picked up Photoshop for album art, someone at a festival asked who made it, and a business started. One step at a time, slow and steady, all the way to a sale. His whole message fits in one line: a web design business should give you freedom and a life you love. And no one wants to buy a job. This episode is for anyone building a business on the side and wondering if it could ever carry the whole load. It's also for anyone spooked by what AI means for their work. In this episode: The Slow & Steady name Josh wishes he'd grabbed first From metal-band drummer and laid-off cabinet maker to agency owner The coffee with Elegant Themes' content manager that started his teaching career Why "freelancer" is a fancy term for a job Selling the agency in 2020 to a student who was leaving his role as a pastor Two secret weapons: genuine care and better communication than anybody Why the five-out-of-ten designer who communicates beats the ten-out-of-ten who doesn't AI as "the new nephew," and what the Wix panic of 2016 predicts about it About Josh Hall Josh is a web design business coach, podcast host, and web agency founder based in Columbus, Ohio. He built and scaled his own agency for over a decade before selling it in 2020 to focus full time on teaching web designers how to build businesses of their own. Through his podcast, YouTube channel, courses, and his community Web Designer Pro®, he's helped thousands of designers build toward freedom. He's a proud work-from-home husband and father of 3 littles, 5 if you include the 2 Golden Retrievers. His definition of slow and steady: "Few fun tasks/projects per week and a pretty open calendar." Web Designer Pro®: https://webdesignerpro.com/  Josh's podcast: https://joshhall.co/podcast Josh on YouTube: https://joshhall.co/youtube  All of Josh's links: https://joshhall.co/media ARTILLERY Links:  Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/  Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en  Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia

Guest episode of Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY. In this episode, Jake and John sit down with Josh Petersen, Hub Director at The Hope Venture, a Lincoln-based nonprofit that connects donors to health and education projects for people in extreme poverty across South Asia and Africa. Fifteen-plus years, thirty-plus projects, and more than 100,000 people helped. Josh is an almost-trained architect who learned graphic design, video, web design, and event design along the way. He built the website the whole giving operation runs on. So it's worth hearing him say it plainly: the website is the tool, but it's not what turns a visitor into a donor. People give to people. This episode is for founders, marketers, and anyone who's ever over-invested in a clever feature and under-invested in the human follow-up that actually converts. It's also for anyone who needs permission to rest. In this episode: The 100% model, and why donors get excited about funding overhead Why every new partner starts with about $1,000 and a single project From 50-cent meals in India to a water pipeline serving 10,000 people in Kenya The website as the primary giving hub, and the quiz that got zero donations Why people give to people, not annual reports and data The life-size mud hut that fell off the trailer on the way to the event "Unforced rhythms of grace," and the monthly day of space for the whole team The first-ever $1M donation that came right after a missed goal About Josh Petersen Josh is the Hub Director at The Hope Venture, a Christian nonprofit in Lincoln, Nebraska that connects donors to health and education projects for people in extreme poverty. He leads its fundraising and marketing, and he's worked his way from graphic designer to creative director to marketing director to Hub Director over roughly ten years. A maker at heart, and dad to two boys. His mantra: "The unforced rhythms of grace. We inquire and leap, but then we wait and see what happens. Oftentimes the next best step is to rest." The Hope Venture: https://thehopeventure.org The Heart Behind the Risk (Hope Venture's new podcast on generosity): https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Js2F7NpEcHsYfXfhiapx7?si=c607654a4dc14333 Reach Josh directly: [email protected] / 402-770-6310 Instagram + YouTube: @thehopeventure Artillery Links Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/ Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia

A solo episode. Just Jake, a 31-page report, and a few thoughts on the matter. SiteGround, the hosting company behind all 500-plus ARTILLERY sites, published "AI in WordPress: The 2026 Landscape for Small Businesses." Jake read the whole thing and walks through it with a practitioner's eye, keeping in mind that SiteGround also sells its own AI tool. Some of the data is genuinely useful. Some of it is worth pushing back on. The big picture: WordPress runs about 43% of the internet, and roughly a third of the people running it are small business owners who never signed up to be web developers. Over half now use AI daily, mostly for research and content. But 41% say it takes multiple tries to get a usable result, and 22% don't trust its accuracy. AI saves time, and somebody still has to know whether the answer is any good. This episode is for business owners who have a website, use AI for the easy wins, and want an honest read on where it actually helps and where it quietly creates more work. In this episode: Why a hosting company's report is worth reading, and reading skeptically Why almost 60% of owners say WordPress itself is the hard part What business owners actually use AI for (research and content win) The plugin monster, and why 96% of WordPress security problems start there Where AI is great: structured, repeatable, bounded work Where you still need a human: strategy, brand, and what the homepage says "Start with the workflow, not the tool," and keeping a human in the loop Artillery Links Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/ Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia