So you're in the business of selling WordPress websites? If you are in that business, then I can guarantee you that there's more money to be made than just getting the site done and then moving on. Today it's all about the upsells that we might offer. We go through a list of things that we've tried in the past, some of which were profitable and easy to do, others of which were hard and lost us money. It's a lottery to be honest! Things that one person excels at, others might be loathed to do. Website hosting, email hosting, design, custom development, social media, content creation, SEO, optimisation... I could go on. In fact, I (we) do in the episode today. Have a listen and then head over to the post and leave us a comment.
So in the last episode of the WP Builds podcast we were talking about how WordPress hosting has changed. Today it feels like more of the same. Kinsta has been offering managed WordPress hosting for years, and has built up a good business on top of the world's most popular CMS. Well, time and tide wait for no one, and Marcel Bootsman plus Maciek Palmowski are on the podcast today to explain about how they've got a new offering, which is not specifically about WordPress at all. So what have they got then? Application & database hosting is what they've got. Did you not see the title of the podcast?!?! What does that mean? It means that you can now host pretty much anything on the Kinsta platform; you're no longer restricted to WordPress. If you can imagine it, you can now host it with them. What does this mean for the future of the company and their current WordPress customers? Find out in the podcast.
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WP sites and running a web design business from start to finish. Today we're talking about the way that hosting has changed over the years. In much the same way that you look at a website from 1999 and wonder how that was ever allowed to exist, the same is true for the technology stack that is hosting our WordPress websites. Perhaps, back in the day, you ran servers of your own in your office or house. You then likely moved to something like shared hosting and a VPS. Now we've got managed WordPress hosting companies and cloud services which allow to spin up servers in an instant with just the resources we need. Add to that the interest in headless WordPress, and well, we've got a show on our hands and plenty to talk about.
I love a good story, and that's what we've got for you today. It's Steve Burge from PublishPress. Steve's had a long history working with open source software, and, as you'll hear, he's not going anywhere. The conversation kicks off with a bit of background about Steve. We talk about his journey with a whole variety of FOSS tools such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento and WordPress. I know this journey well, as perhaps do many of you. There was a time when there really was a no clear 'winner' in the open source CMS market. Many of the platforms were experiencing growth and there was no hint that any one solution would grow to dominate in terms of market share. Given that the landscape had so many popular choices, Steve decided he was going to create a business around serving them all, and so OS Training began. We learn about how Steve tried to grow the business, and ultimately why he moved on to pastures new. We then get into the things that Steve's involved with now, namely PublishPress and MetaSlider, which is a new acquisition. All in all then, this is a lovely conversation with a very thoughtful developer. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WP sites and running a web design business from start to finish. Today we are talking about 'Monitoring websites for clients'. Relationships with clients after a traditional project rarely end with the site going live. Those who take an agile approach will not have clients continuously responding to user behaviour changes. What should we be monitoring for clients? There's more to this than you might think! And we get into a lot of the tools that we've tried before to make all of this happen. There's a full list in the show notes.
On the podcast today we have Eric Karkovack. He's been in the WordPress space for ages and contributes in a whole variety of ways. I've been wanting to get him on the show for ages, but our calendars kept colliding, until today! We talk about two, not related, subjects. The first is WebP images, and the second is canonical plugins. You might not have heard of WebP images, but they're all the rage! They are / were a project which came out of Google, and their intention was to create a new image format which would create images of high quality, but of a smaller file size. They've not yet made it into WordPress Core. Why is that? We also talk about 'Canonical Plugins' which is a proposal (see the links below in the show notes on the website) to increase the footprint of what WordPress can do, without increasing the footprint of what WordPress can do. That makes sense, right?!?! These canonical plugins would offer some pretty essential features, they would be tested thoroughly with WordPress Core versions, would receive frequent updates and therefore would have kudos; they're more or less guaranteed to work out of the box. Eric and I get into this all as well...
We all do maintenance for our WordPress website clients, right? But what do you cover and what does a client expect? That's the basis of the podcast today... There are many things that you 'could' cover, but many things that perhaps don't want to. Perhaps you know that you're not a security expert, or that configuring your server is a little out of scope. So how do you decide what's in and what's out? Also, we're in an era of 'no-code'. Clients are constantly being bombarded by messages saying that you can have a website which you can build yourself with no experience. How does this play into the equation of what a client will expect from you? Solutions like Wix and Squarespace make this promise a reality and it's no doubt a conversation that you're going to need to combat at some point. Join us on the podcast today to see what we think about this and what we've done in the past...
It's no secret that the world is adopting the model of subscription pricing. If you're my age, then you remember a time when almost nothing was based upon subscriptions. The technology simply made it impractical; there were no credit cards, the internet did not exist, and you just didn't see examples around you. Fast forward (a few decades!), and now they're everywhere. The banking / payments systems have all been built to make this trivial to set up and deploy to the entire world over the internet. WooCommerce has a plugin called WooCommerce Subscriptions which will allow you to get started, but it's limited in what it can do. Enter Subscription Force, a new WordPress plugin which will put your subscriptions on a different level. You can do so much with this, truly. Today we interview Marius Vetrici and Andrei Haret, who are behind Subscription Force to hear what it's all about and how it works.
With all these no code options, do you find your clients are becoming experts and no longer needing you? We try (and fail) to talk about this today and end up going on about JAMStack instead! It's a serious point though. Page Builders and Gutenberg have opened up the website creation process to a whole new audience, and it brings into question what we do as WordPress web developers / builders that make us worthwhile. What can you say to the client to make you seem like value for money in a time when 'affordability' is more important than ever, and when many of the tasks that used to be 'out of scope' for non-technical users, is not possible in an easy-to-use interface? Go listen...
So voice enabled home are now a thing. It's pretty likely that if you don't have a voice enabled device now, you will at some point in the near future. You speak, and they respond. It's pretty cool. But you might have noticed that there are limits to what they can do, and there are ways you learn to speak to these devices to get the best out of them. It's a bit like how you use Google. You don't type in ordinary language; you use Google specific language. What if it were possible to have the capabilities that voice enabled devices bring to the internet to a WordPress website? That would be cool, right? It would be, but the downside is that it's really rather hard to make all of this work, and that's where Convoworks steps in. They've got a GUI to make the job of doing all of this as easy as possible. Tihomir Dmitrović is on the podcast today to explain how it works, when you might use it and how it can benefit your website. Check it out.
What happens when your client suddenly has new staff members that you need to interact with? It might be a really smooth transition with nothing to worry about, but it might not. Old relationships may need to be rebuilt, and common understandings and goals about the website might need to be reworked. It's even possible that your communications were not written down and you suddenly need to think about the entire project once more with new staff. What if you just don't get along? What can you do then to ensure that you don't lose the client? What can you do to keep things working for you both? We have some ideas for you on the podcast today. Go listen...
So if you've kept up with the latest developments in WordPress then you'll have heard the words / phrases 'Gutenberg', 'FSE', 'Block Themes', 'Blocks' and a lot more. You'll also likely have heard of our guest on the podcast today, Rich Tabor. He's been in the WordPress space for many years working in the theme space, but now he's shifted over to all the 'new things', and is making waves. He's got some monumental projects on the go (see the links on the WP Builds post for this episode), and is on the podcast today to talk about where WordPress is at right now and what he's hoping for in the future. It's a lovely interview with a very thoughtful guest, and if you're trying out the 'new WordPress things', or are just looking for a reason why you should, then this episode is for you!
