In this episode:
Discussion – How to get client referrals – [2:54]
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Interview – Keeping your work organised inside WordPress with Corey Maass – [27:00]
Ending Fact – How much do web designers earn? – [1:07:06]
Modern life is busy! You don’t need me to tell you that though do you? If you’re anything like me then you have a hard time keeping up with all the myriad things that you need to do. It’s not just work, it’s everything; things pile up and my brain cannot cope!
Well it turns out that people have been busy and struggling to keep up with their tasks for a long time, and it was the Japanese who decided that the world needed a solution – Kanban.
I have no doubt that you’ve seen this before, and perhaps you’ve even played with a SaaS app that uses this technique? The idea is that you group your tasks in to ‘lanes’; vertically aligned so that you can keep track of their status. In web building work we might have tasks filed under: pending, in progress, paused, completed etc. Each time we have a new task for that project, we add it in under the correct ‘lane’ and then move it along when the status is updated. When all the tasks are in the completed lane, the project is over and we drink beer!
Back in the day, there were no computers and so the system was one based upon cards that you manually moved on a large board, but the Kanban methodology is so perfect for computers and drag and drop that it’s taken off all over the place.
You can make up whatever task statuses you like; they could be to do with sales or customer acquisition… anything goes!
Corey is a big fan of Kanban and, being a WordPress developer, he wanted a Kanban solution that he could use for his day to day work. So he built Kanban for WordPress, a plugin which gives you all the task management goodness inside of the WordPress interface that you know and love. Corey explains why he wanted to build this inside of WordPress and not develop this as a standalone SaaS app. The huge user base, the fact that permissions and roles are all taken care of… we could go on!
There’s a free version in the WordPress repo. It’s got a great set of features, but there’s also a Kanban Pro version which has a subscription attached.
The pro version adds a whole heap of capabilities, such as task comments, advanced user management, multiple boards and notifications, and Corey explains how these can be used.
There’s a new version 3 of the plugin which is currently in beta, but it might be worth looking at that to see what Corey has in store in the coming months.
I really enjoyed doing this podcast with Corey, so much so that we both decided that we’d do a webinar to let the WP Builds audience see exactly how it works and what it does. It’s on Thursday 13th September 2018 at 9pm UK time. You can find the signup page by clicking here.
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