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.
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...
WordPress website maintenance and care plans might be something that you like to do, but they also might get in the way of the actual building of your websites. FixRunner are here to help you with that. They will handle all of the dull management tasks for you so that you can focus upon your clients and their website build needs. They offer all the expected things like updates, fixes, backups, but have a pretty unique one-fix pricing options as well meaning you don't need to subscribe to their service if you just need one thing fixing. Listen to founder Sam Mulaim on the podcast today...
Today on the WP Builds podcast we're talking about health. Not your health, but the health of the WordPress sites you build or manage. Turns out that there's a boatload of things that need to be done regularly to keep your sites fighting fit. From backing them up to monitoring their uptime. Checking that they're okay after updates to keeping up with the latest SEO trends. I could go on for a lot longer, in fact David and I do in the podcast. From an agency perspective, this episode is particularly interesting because many of the things that we discuss today are areas which you can productise and sell to your clients; because honestly, they're unlikely to be something that your clients are interested in, they'll just want to know that it's done. Go check out the podcast today.
WP Buffs has been a company on the rise for several years now. I'm sure that you've seen some of their content and perhaps listened to their podcast or attended their WPMMR summit? The podcast today is all about how you can grow a 'side gig' business into a thriving business by creating engaging content around the subjects that your target audience really want to know about. So WP Buffs is really in the business of maintaining WordPress website, but how do you get noticed in this competitive field? How do you gain new customers when your rivals already have heritage? Content, that's how. Joe Howard explains how they created content which they knew people wanted to consume from keyword research. Blog posts, then a podcast, then a virtual summit. Join us on the podcast today to see how they did it...
Where should you go for support for WordPress plugins, themes and blocks? This debate was partly prompted by a WP Tavern article regarding what can be done about the WordPress.org forum being used to support premium versions of plugins which are not in the repository. There seems to be a lot of complexity to this due to the varying expectations of support and the vast difference in what plugin and themes do. We are probably better for having both types of support, but perhaps polarizing these can help explore the topic. Find out which is the best way to receive support on the WP Builds Podcast today. Go listen...
Today we talk about how to keep your WordPress website running smoothly, whether that's one month or one year after you launched it. So we all know that having a website is more work than most people think. There's a ton of things that need to go on in the background to ensure that it's up and running, performing well and getting you leads. As WordPress web professionals, we take much of this for granted. In fact I was thinking as I wrote this post of all the little tasks that it takes to create a website and then keep it running in a performant way, and I was honestly surprised at all the things that I could think of. There were dozens...! Today we have Alexandru Covtun on the podcast to tackle this subject. He's with WP Dandy which is a WordPress maintenance and support company, so he knows what he's on about. Go listen...
This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 23rd March 2020
Today we have Kyle Van Deusen on as a WP Builds ‘Contribute’ guest. Kyle and Matt are hosts of The Admin Bar, and they’ve come up with something that you really ought to take a look at. You know when…
Should we be available on the phone to deal with client issues for our WordPress website business? I have had this conversation so many times in the past with so many people! We all know that, in the right hands, a phone can be one of the best ways to engage with your clients. But, in the wrong hands, the phone can be a scary thing that wastes your time and causes you stress and anxiety. See what we think...
In this, the 7th episode of the WP Builds podcast, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley discuss web site care plans. We discuss what we both do to create recurring / passive revenue for our web design businesses, what works and what does not.
There's so much to this topic, support requests, backups, security...
