WP Builds

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 7th 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 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.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 31st October 2022.

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...

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 24th October 2022.

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...

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 17th October 2022.

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.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 10th October 2022.

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...