WP Builds

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 2nd January 2023.

Welcome to the penultimate episode in our Business Bootcamp series. Usually, this is where I write... "where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish". But if you are joining us now, you probably need to go back a year to season one! We are on Season 5, which is the last in this Bootcamp series and is about what happens after the website build. This is episode 5. Today we are talking about Future Proofing (our tech based business and maybe our clients’ sites). We're supposed to be talking about Traditional (Waterfall) v Agile, but as you'll hear we get slightly derailed and go off piste for quite a bit of the podcast, which is fun! We cover: Reduce or embrace dependencies? Should we offer long term support? What kind of efforts do we put into making sure that we're keeping our knowledge and skills up to date? Check it out...

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th December 2022.

So we have Katie Keith on the podcast today to talk about what they're doing over at Barn2 plugins. First off, we tackle the history of the company, and importantly, why they have such a peculiar name! We then get into their journey into the WooCommerce space and how that's enabled them to grow into the small, but mighty team that they are today. We then list out some of their more popular plugins and Katie explains what each one does and when you might need to deploy it. Lastly, we get into acquisitions. The WordPress space has been literally full of them over the last couple of years and WooCommerce plugins have been fairly popular 'buys' for some of the bigger players. Katie talks about this and how they wish to stay the course and keep the business going nuder their own steam.

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.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 21st November 2022.

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.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 14th November 2022.

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.