WP Builds: Recent Episodes
Nathan Wrigley
Web site building with WordPress. In this podcast we follow the hopeless exploits of David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley as they try, and fail, to understand WordPress. They know that they love building websites with WordPress, but the complexities of this awesome web building solution are always out of reach. Not only are they not clever enough, but they just don't try all that hard
Join Nathan Wrigley, Rhys Wynne, Marc Benzakein, Bud Kraus. The conversation focused on recent WordPress news, including a surge in security vulnerability reports, new AI-related regulations in the EU, and the latest WordPress 7.0.3 and 7.1 releases. A key theme that emerged was plugin and site security, especially in response to AI and evolving threats. The discussion explored community initiatives like the WordPress Credit Program and improvements in accessibility documentation. Several points were raised, including new Playground UI features, the WordPress event calendar, and transparent handling of recent plugin security issues. Some lighthearted banter and personal reflections rounded out the episode.
The conversation focused on Niels Arts and his work on Clonable, a SaaS solution for managing multilingual websites. One concept discussed was how Clonable allows site owners to create separate versions of their websites in different languages, keeping them synchronised while permitting specific local changes. We also chatted about the technical method of scraping and translating site content automatically, rather than relying solely on plugins. The discussion explored translation quality, handling of updates, plugin integrations, pricing tiers, and the practical realities of running international websites.
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Cami MacNamara, Alex Standiford. The conversation focused on recent developments in the WordPress ecosystem, including highlights from version 7.1, a new accessibility community initiative, and a modern revamp of the WordPress admin using AI. The discussion explored WordCamp events, educational initiatives, and marketing strategies for agencies and freelancers, emphasizing community engagement and business resilience. Several points were raised, including client feedback tools, plugin analytics, and innovative approaches in AI and content management. Insights into imposter syndrome, contributor retention, and the impact of large-scale email campaigns rounded out the key themes for web professionals working with WordPress.
Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy joined this “At The Core” episode to highlight what's ahead in WordPress 7.1. Anne, as release lead, outlined major features like responsive styling, persistent admin bar, and improved inline notes. Birgit emphasised practical upgrades such as the new image crop modal and customisable viewports. Both guests celebrated the retention of the Classic Block after strong community feedback. Anne also covered the collaborative editing outreach effort, while Birgit explained developer-focused changes and the importance of testing. Together, Birgit and Anne championed community transparency, robust security, and a smoother WordPress core experience. All very cool!
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Marc Benzakein, Zach Stepek. The conversation focused on major WordPress developments, including the release of WordPress 7.0.2 and its AI-discovered vulnerability, updates in WordPress 7.1 beta 3, and the introduction of new Gutenberg features like playlist and tabs blocks. A key theme that emerged was the growing impact, both positive and challenging, of AI in web development and security. The discussion explored WordPress market share trends, accessibility requirements for themes, community initiatives and events, and the launch of experimental tools like a Canva-like page builder and a WordPress browser extension. Several points were raised, including plugin performance and strategies for community engagement.
Today were talking about the creation and evolution of the Slidy Panel WordPress plugin, designed to offer customisable slide-in panels for block-based sites. We discussed the challenge of plugin naming and adapting to block directory requirements, and the impact of AI on the web development industry. We also got into the need for human expertise in bespoke website creation. Towards the end, we explored agency life, plugin marketing, and the necessity of adaptability in a changing digital landscape. As always, there's some humour thrown in, this time around careers, collectibles, and the unpredictable future of WordPress professionals.
The conversation focused on Amber Hinds’ personal journey restoring faith in the WordPress community during challenging times. A key theme was how Amber’s Accessibility Checker plugin has succeeded thanks to her relentless long-term effort, deep expertise in accessibility, and a strategic focus on higher-budget clients like agencies and enterprises. The discussion explored Amber’s commitment to intentional marketing, collaborative teamwork, and showing up consistently rather than looking for quick fixes. Amber shared what marketing tactics worked for her, what she chose to leave behind, and the importance of playing the long game to build lasting WordPress product success.
Join Nathan Wrigley, Sé Reed, Marc Benzakein, Alex Standiford. The conversation focused on current trends in the WordPress ecosystem, including the decision to retain the classic block, the release of an open source documentary, and concerns over declining plugin sales and community participation. A key theme that emerged was the shifting landscape caused by AI and changing community dynamics, with discussions on WordCamp US attendance, regional events, and plugin market challenges. The discussion explored alternatives to Meetup.com, highlighted the Yoast Community Fund recipient, and mentioned new tools like GatherPress and Fluent Player. Several points were raised, including the importance of open source, discoverability, and adapting to changing user needs.
Well this is a different episode from the normal things we get into on WP Builds. It's about the intersection of human creativity and AI, sparked by a handmade zine (I did not know what that was) titled "Human Creativity in the Age of AI." Tess talks about the emotional and practical significance of creative processes versus AI-generated output. We explore how AI is 'democratising' access to creative tools, the shifting definition of art, and the ethical concerns around replacing human skills. Then there's the whole thing about the value of human ideas, imperfection, and individuality, even as AI capabilities rapidly advance and reshape artistic expression. Like I say, not your typical WP Builds podcast episode, but fun nonetheless!
The conversation focused on current trends and challenges in the WordPress ecosystem, with a key theme being the pervasive influence of AI, public perceptions across age groups, and ethical considerations. The discussion explored WordPress developments such as accessibility resources, core testing needs, and analysis of market share decline. Several points were raised, including major migrations like CERN’s adoption of WordPress, job cuts at Elementor, the shifting visibility of WPBeginner in search, WordPress education initiatives, and sustainability in web development.
Join Nathan Wrigley, Simon Pollard, and Mike Johnston!
The conversation focused on generational attitudes towards AI, with a particular emphasis on skepticism among young people, how younger generations ideologically distrust big tech and perceive AI as "cheating," especially in creative fields like art and music. We also explored concerns about job displacement, changes in workplace efficiency, and the impact of AI on creative industries. Towards the ens we get into the inevitability of adopting AI to remain competitive, the environmental impact, and potential backlash against AI-driven content, alongside reflections on authenticity and the growing influence of major tech companies.
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Marc Benzakein, Robert Jacobi.
The conversation focused on the current state and future of the WordPress community, exploring issues such as the aging user base, challenges in attracting younger contributors, industry events, and market share trends. A key theme that emerged was the impact of AI on workflows and plugin development, as well as concerns about declining community engagement and WordCamps. The discussion explored plugin update delays, marketing approaches, the importance of relationships, and various new initiatives and tools in WordPress, including contributor dashboards and AI-powered design features.
The podcast today is all about the Shorthand plugin, a visual storytelling platform that helps create immersive, interactive content for WordPress. We find out how Shorthand enables news organisations, brands, nonprofits, and agencies to craft stories, reports, and proposals without extensive technical knowledge. The new WordPress plugin streamlines the editorial process, allowing real-time collaboration, and keeps content within WordPress. We also get into Shorthand’s adaptability for alternative use cases, such as podcasts and annual reports, and also touch on its pricing model. The episode highlighted the growing demand for richer, more engaging digital storytelling. Go listen.
The conversation focused on the upcoming WordPress 7.1 release, new features, and community developments. A key theme that emerged was the challenge of organising and sustaining local WordPress events, including strategies for attracting speakers and attendees. The discussion explored multilingual support in the Make WordPress Slack, event funding and marketing attribution, and the pros and cons of paid event roles. Security concerns, recent supply chain attacks, and regulatory changes affecting EU site operators were also addressed. The episode concluded with announcements about meetups, resources, and a personal note highlighting a band performance.
The conversation focused on the integration between WooCommerce and YouTube, enabling merchants to showcase and sell products directly through their YouTube channels. We discussed how the Google for WooCommerce plugin simplifies syncing WooCommerce inventory with YouTube, allowing product overlays within videos and store tabs on channels. The discussion explored the importance of authenticity and trust in influencer marketing, YouTube’s role as a powerful search and shopping platform, and practical requirements for using these features. A key theme that emerged was making social commerce accessible and streamlined for merchants. Go listen...
The conversation focused on WordPress news and broader tech topics. Key themes included grill brush injuries!!!!, the US government’s ban on new AI models, debates around social media harm and age restrictions, and reflections on recent WordPress developments such as the CERN website migration from Drupal, WordPress Mercantile’s redesign, and the Five for the Future initiative’s new pledge and profile pages. The discussion explored WordPress event formats, plugin security vulnerabilities, and community engagement challenges, highlighting the need for volunteer enjoyment and adaptation as WordPress evolves. Go listen...
The conversation focused on Angie, Elementor’s AI-driven tool for WordPress, highlighting its integration, ease of use, and ability to generate custom code snippets and widgets without requiring Elementor’s page builder. A key theme that emerged was the evolving role of AI in web development, blending rapid AI-generated first drafts with refinements through traditional interfaces. The discussion got into how Angie facilitates both creativity and efficiency, supports best WordPress practices, and safeguards site changes through sandboxing. Several points were raised, including Angie’s token-based access model and its fast-growing adoption with over 30,000 active installs.
The conversation focused on WordPress community updates, recent trends in plugin and security landscapes, and user concerns over AI integration and site management practices. A key theme that emerged was the impact of AI on plugin vulnerabilities and security workflows, with organisations like Wordfence and Patchstack adjusting policies in response to AI-driven threats. The discussion explored declining contributions within the WordPress project, responses to major WordPress events, and controversy surrounding plugin installations and repricing by companies. Several points were raised, including community engagement, transparency, and the importance of user consent in product changes.
Today, the podcast is focused on the practical and personal impact of AI in daily workflows and business operations. One theme that emerged was the creation of a custom AI-powered journaling and knowledge management system, Navigator, used for personal insights, team collaboration, and onboarding. The discussion explored how AI provides a “second brain,” enhances memory, and enables more intentional business strategies. Several points were raised, including privacy concerns, the evolution of AI in work life, and its transformative effect on team communication and productivity. The episode highlighted both the opportunities and challenges posed by integrating AI deeply into business processes.
The conversation focused on WordPress 7.0’s release, highlighting major features such as the new WP AI client, a modernised dashboard, improved revision tracking, enhanced gallery blocks with lightbox effects, and refined responsive controls. We also get into the delay and removal of collaborative editing due to technical challenges, discussion on performance, host involvement, and future release cycles. The discussion explored Automattic’s “radical speed month,” new browser extensions, plugin updates, and ongoing relevance of classic themes. Several points were raised, including community engagement in testing, leadership changes in the AI team, upcoming events, and the ever-present topic of the weather!
Nathan Wrigley interviews Lovekesh Kumar, a WordPress engineer at rtCamp, about WPM, a new, secure, Go-based package manager for WordPress plugins and themes. Lovekesh explains the pain points of managing plugins in enterprise environments, especially regarding premium plugins and security. WPM centralises package management, resolves dependencies, handles private and public plugins, and verifies packages with cryptographic signatures. The episode covers the motivation behind WPM, its features, adoption process, and its focus on improving supply chain security and workflow efficiency for WordPress developers and agencies.
Nathan Wrigley interviews Marcus Burnette, about his new project, wellplayedwp.com, a membership platform offering a growing library of eclectic WordPress, Elementor, and WooCommerce plugins under a single license. They discuss Marcus’ background in the WordPress community, the inspiration behind the project, pricing strategies, and the types of plugins available. Marcus also touches on his educational tech projects, including a classroom library tool and the relaunch of Flip Quiz, a Jeopardy-style classroom game platform. Also check out his work The WP World! Go listen...
This episode covers the delay of WordPress 7.0 and the removal of real-time collaborative editing from its release, citing technical and performance challenges. The discussion explores newly emerging features in WordPress, including the rapid development of custom post type and custom field management in Gutenberg, AI’s growing influence in the ecosystem, supply chain security efforts, and innovations like WordPress Desktop Mode. The hosts also touch on recent community events, challenges facing large WordPress gatherings, industry layoffs influenced by AI, and ongoing efforts to improve plugin and site security.
Nathan Wrigley interviews Giles Beckley, creator of WP Goose (Goose Commerce), a new WordPress e-commerce plugin designed natively for Elementor with a unique desktop app and built-in AI functionality. Giles explains the platform’s benefits: custom database structure (not custom post types), streamlined management via the desktop app, security features, and granular styling through Elementor widgets. The episode covers feature highlights, flexibility, and current early-access pricing. There's an invite for early adopters to give feedback and an announcement of plans for a full launch at WordCamp Europe, positioning Goose Commerce as a modern WooCommerce alternative for Elementor users.
This episode covers key developments in the WordPress ecosystem, including recent security issues with plugins, upcoming features in WordPress 7, and experiments from Automattic developers such as reimagining WP Admin as a desktop OS. The panel discusses the importance of AI governance, new community initiatives like WordPress Student Clubs, and notable product launches, including a suite of utility plugins and a professional development platform. The episode also highlights practical tools for productivity and shares insights on the evolving landscape for WordPress professionals and users.
Nathan Wrigley interviews James Welbes, about his journey in the WordPress space, his early frustrations and eventual embrace of WordPress, and the transformative impact of AI on web development. They discuss the rapid evolution of AI, its effect on productivity, and the culture shifts occurring as people interact more with AI tools. James shares his experiences building apps with AI, the changing value of WordPress, and trends of developers moving away from traditional platforms. The episode explores the societal and psychological aspects of AI while reflecting on the fast-changing tech landscape.
This episode covers the delay of WordPress 7.0 due to performance concerns with collaborative editing, the introduction of a new contributor tool for WordCamp events, insights from the latest State of WordPress Agency report highlighting increasing challenges and agency burnout, and a new initiative at Automattic allowing selected staff a month to pursue independent projects. Additional topics include recent community events, a new theme launch, and issues with WooCommerce subscriptions auto-renewals impacting revenue. The discussion get into the need for specialisation, adaptability, and proactive evolution within the WordPress ecosystem.
In this episode, Nathan interviews Lucas Santos Junqueira from Brazil, about his innovative tool and WordPress plugin, Tilbuci (pronounced "Chabousi"). The plugin enables users to create interactive, animated “movies” inside the WordPress dashboard, similar to museum exhibits or advanced infographics. Lucas explains its origins, features, and versatility, including collaborative creation, export options, and interactivity. They discuss its complexity, available tutorials, challenges like accessibility, and design considerations for responsiveness and touch interactions. Lucas shares resources and support options for users wanting to explore or get help with Tilbuci.
In this episode, Nathan interviews Brian Gardner about his pioneering work in WordPress theming, the rise and impact of the Genesis Framework, and the shift toward block-based themes. They discuss the promise, challenges, and slower-than-hoped adoption of block editing, as well as its design flexibility through patterns. The conversation also explores the influence of AI tools like Miles on WordPress design, the evolving theme business landscape, and the future of web creation with AI-generated patterns and themes integrated into WordPress workflows.
In this episode, Nathan chats with WordPress educator Jonathan Jernigan about Cloudflare, what it is, how it works, and why it's valuable for website owners. Jonathan explains Cloudflare’s role as both a firewall and content delivery network, enhancing security and performance by blocking threats and replicating sites globally. They discuss practical use cases like reducing spam, setting firewall rules, and leveraging free Cloudflare features. The conversation also touches on Cloudflare’s business model, single points of failure, backups, and Jonathan’s course for beginners looking to learn more about Cloudflare’s capabilities.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley and Jamie Marsland debate the impacts of AI on WordPress and broader society - spoiler alert: Nathan wins!! ;-). Jamie shares insights on the new Claude WordPress.com integration, highlighting AI’s growing contextual awareness and its effect on website creation, content, and business strategy. Nathan challenges with concerns about content overload, authenticity, and the erosion of craftsmanship, sparking a lively discussion about the balance between technological advancement and maintaining human value in creativity and community. Ultimately, they explore both excitement and uncertainty about AI’s role in the future of WordPress.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jon Penland, CEO of Kinsta, about his career journey from self-education in tech to leading a rapidly growing company. Jon shares insights on the importance of curiosity, hard work, and adaptability in career growth. They discuss Kinsta’s involvement in the WordPress community, their approach to AI and hosting advancements, and the vital role of collaboration and human support in their business. The conversation also touches on Kinsta's broader app platform, the evolving challenges in hosting, and the future of WordPress and web technology.
In this episode of TWiW, the panel discusses WP Engine’s acquisition of WPackagist, recent rapid-fire WordPress security updates, and highlights educational initiatives within the WordPress community. They also explore an agency’s strategic use of AI, preview upcoming features in WordPress 7, and cover the expanded functionality of the Ollie theme for WooCommerce. Additional topics include the release of a per-page theme switcher plugin, WordCamp Asia updates, and privacy considerations with Signal. The conversation is, as always, lively with tangents, especially on the growing intersection of AI and WordPress development.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Naweed Chougle about eBook Crafter, a WordPress plugin that lets users transform their blog posts into editable, customisable ebooks. Naweed explains the inspiration for the plugin, its key features, like using the block editor to repurpose and edit content before exporting, and future plans including additional file formats and self-publishing integrations. They discuss use cases such as creating lead magnets, educational materials, and distraction-free reading experiences, as well as how the tool can boost content value and audience engagement. Go listen...
Join us for the 'This Week in #WordPress' show, with Nathan Wrigley, Taco Verdonschot, Bud Kraus, Dan Knauss, Steve Burge. Wow, that's a LOT! This episode covers the latest developments in WordPress, including updates in WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.6, new featured plugin initiatives to boost discoverability, and discussions around advanced developer certifications. The panel explores AI’s growing role, collaborative editing features, and the FAIR project’s shift towards TYPO3. Other topics include WordPress Campus Connect in Malaysia, accessibility efforts, Divi 5’s release, and quirky tech stories like neural networks playing Doom and ultra-compact phones. The episode balances technical insights with community highlights and lighter moments, reflecting on both the challenges and innovations shaping WordPress today.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Ben Pines about founder-led marketing, particularly in the WordPress and SaaS spaces. Ben explains how traditional marketing tactics like SEO and paid ads are less effective due to AI-generated content, and advocates for a personal, trust-building approach where founders consistently share authentic insights. He describes how he helps founders develop a marketing system with minimal time commitment, just 1-2 hours a week, focused on genuine business sense and value, not just features. The discussion also touches on the importance of making marketing feel human and credible. Go listen...
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Ian Svoboda, an experienced WordPress developer, about his Content Area Block plugin. They discuss the inspiration behind the plugin, which allows multiple editable content areas within WordPress templates, solving a long-standing challenge for editors and developers. Ian explains the technical hurdles in developing the plugin and how it improves the editorial experience by enabling flexible, visual block placement beyond standard post content. The episode also touches on potential core integration and the benefits for editorial teams seeking more intuitive WordPress layouts. Go listen...
In this lively episode of TWiW, the panel dives into a range of WordPress topics, from the excitement around WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 and collaborative editing to hot debates about JavaScript usage and the dominance of Cloudflare. The conversation also covers AI’s expanding role in the ecosystem, open-source developments, cybersecurity concerns, and the importance of password managers. The episode is filled with community updates, a look at new tools, and plenty of lighthearted moments, including an ongoing joke about organising a rap battle showdown. Go listen...
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Andy Bell, an expert in CSS and web design, about his journey from traditional design to becoming a sought-after CSS specialist. They discuss the evolution of CSS, the importance of leaning into web standards, and the challenges of agency work with high-profile clients. Andy also opens up about a tough 2025, the impact of AI on the industry, his agency’s anti-AI stance, and the value of authenticity and community in tech. Go listen...
This episode of TWiW covers the latest in WordPress, with a strong focus on AI advancements, new products, and features expected in WordPress 7. The discussion includes updates on community events, challenges with in-person meetups post-pandemic, and the integration of AI tools for site management and design. The hosts also touch on debates around sponsored talks at WordCamps, the evolution of commercial and community aspects within WordPress, and recent plugin developments. Listeners get insights into both technical advancements and the shifting landscape of the WordPress community.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Thomas Raef about WordPress website security. Thomas shares his journey founding We Watch Your Website, discusses the prevalence of attacks on US WordPress sites, and explores how hackers increasingly use stolen credentials and AI-powered methods. The episode gets into AI tools for both attackers and defenders, highlighting strategies like behavioural analysis and other mathematical things I don't understand! It wraps up with advice on implementing security measures like 2FA and device trust, and the ongoing AI "arms race" in cybersecurity. Go listen...
This episode with Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Marc Benzakein, Rhys Wynne explores the renewed importance of blogging and owning your content in 2026, discusses WordPress's educational initiatives and their overlapping complexities, reviews recent updates including the 6.9.1 release and a new Wayback Machine plugin, and gets into the prevalence of AI in WordPress development. Panelists debate the ethics, utility, and future impacts of AI, the challenges of local meetups, and celebrate community efforts. The show features lively listener interaction and concludes with reflections on blogging versus social media, and ongoing WordPress community changes.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with podcasting veteran Seth Goldstein about his 15+ years in the industry. They discuss how easy podcasting has become, the importance of having a plan and process, and how podcasts can serve brands and businesses beyond immediate monetisation. Seth shares insights on podcast production, discoverability, the role of websites and WordPress, pitfalls of AI-generated podcasts, and why authentic personality keeps listeners engaged. They also touch on the value of process documentation, niche audiences, and why starting small and staying consistent is key to podcast success.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Carl Alexander, creator of Ymir (a scalable WordPress hosting technology), and Paul Carter from BuiltFast, about their new partnership. They discuss Carl's perseverance in developing Ymir, the technical benefits it brings to scalable WordPress hosting, and how BuiltFast plans to make this technology accessible to more users. The episode explores the changing expectations of customers and hosting companies, the need for invisible, reliable scalability, and how this collaboration aims to remove server limitations for ambitious WordPress projects. Go listen...
This Week in WordPress #363 with Nathan Wrigley, Jess Frick, Marc Benzakein, Marcus Burnette. This episode covers a range of WordPress-related topics, including the upcoming release of WordPress 6.9.1, the launch of a new centralised home for WordPress education initiatives, and trusted companies and individuals in the WordPress ecosystem. The panel also dives into the evolving role of AI in WordPress, discussing benchmarks, industry changes, and the impact of AI-driven advertising. Lighter moments feature fun conversations about corgis, alligators, and community experiences, all while emphasising the importance of collaboration, humility, and adapting to new technologies within the WordPress space.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Taylor Drayson, a young WordPress professional who shares his journey into web development, inspired by his self-employed father. Taylor discusses projects like WP Extended, a modular plugin for WordPress agencies, and Snippet Club, his membership site offering code snippets and tutorials. He also talks about his work with WP Managed Ninja, managing community feedback and product improvements. Together, they delve into WordPress’s changing demographics, tech debt, community culture, and its future appeal to younger generations. Go listen...
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Andrew Palmer, Marcus Burnette for the latest episode of This Week in WordPress. This episode covers the latest developments in WordPress, including discussions on the impact and future of AI in the ecosystem, details about the upcoming WordPress 7.0 release, the drop of older PHP support, and significant changes to plugin submissions due to a surge in AI-generated plugins. The panel also touches on new community roles, shifts in event structures, and notable news from both WooCommerce and Guildenberg, while reflecting on the broader trends shaping the WordPress landscape in 2026.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Michael Campanella, a professional photographer and developer of the Folio Blocks WordPress gallery plugin. They explore the plugin’s visual gallery options, including grid, justified, masonry, carousel, video, and a unique modular gallery, designed to offer photographers greater creative control. The discussion covers Folio Blocks’ deep integration with the block editor, features like taxonomy-based filtering, WooCommerce integration for sales, easy image downloads, and its pricing structure. Michael shares insights on why he built the plugin and highlights its strengths for users needing powerful, modern media galleries on WordPress. Check it out...
Come and join us LIVE for the This Week in WordPress show. This week I'm with Michelle Frechette, Anne-Mieke Bovelett, Marc Benzakein and we're going to be going over the last 7 days in the WordPress space. This episode covers recent WordPress news and trends, with a strong focus on accessibility, including actionable insights for improving SEO and user experience. It explores plugin market changes, collaboration tools, and AI’s impact on the community and development workflows. Discussion highlights include practical advice for building accessible sites, reflections on plugin sales and irreplaceability, emerging tools for WordPress optimisation, and upcoming WordPress events across the globe. The show gets into adaptability, community strength, and ongoing opportunities in the WordPress ecosystem despite technological shifts. Check it out...
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Dave Foy about his journey from classroom teaching to creating online WordPress courses. Dave discusses the challenges of keeping tech courses up-to-date, the struggle with perfectionism, and why traditional self-paced courses often don’t deliver the best results. He shares his recent shift to a live cohort-based teaching model, which encourages action, community, and accountability, ultimately leading to better student outcomes. The episode is full of insights on educational methods, tech teaching, and personal growth. Go listen...
This episode kicks off the new year with reflections on WordPress’ most-read news of 2025, covering both community achievements and challenges. The conversation explores resolutions, AI-powered tools for WordPress and app building, plugin submission issues, and the evolving role of AI in web development. Updates touch on upcoming WordPress releases, event schedules, and initiatives like the Zeel Memorial Scholarship, all while highlighting the importance of collaboration, innovation, and maintaining a positive, supportive community.
In this episode of WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley and Rae Morey recap the past few months in the WordPress ecosystem. They talk about the new features of WordPress 6.9, discuss advances in AI tools and APIs, and highlight community news including sponsorship shifts, legal updates, and standout block themes like Ollie. The conversation also touches on flagship WordCamp scheduling challenges, the launch of Telex, and the evolving role of Jetpack. Throughout, Rae Morey provides expert insight, drawing on her reporting for The Repository. Go listen...
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Courtney Robertson and Jesse Friedman. This episode covers highlights in the WordPress community, including upcoming events like CloudFest Hackathon, the Open Source Experience conference, and CMSConf. The panel discusses the release of WordPress 6.9, early planning for version 7.0, and new plugins. Other topics include the evolution of responsive block editing, the debate around integrating AI as a core component of WordPress, updates to the Global Partnership program, and reflections on Black Friday purchases. The discussion talks about collaboration, innovation, and adapting to emerging technologies while maintaining an open, user-focused approach.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Anne-Mieke Bovelett about her experience leading a winning accessibility project at the CloudFest Hackathon 2025. Anne-Mieke shares her passion for digital accessibility, discusses the challenges and impact of her team's AI-powered WordPress plugin that converts infographics into accessible formats, and reflects on the need for ongoing support and funding for hackathon projects. The conversation also touches on the broader importance of accessibility and potential improvements for future hackathons. Go listen...
On "This Week in WordPress #358," Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Davinder Singh Kainth and Marc Benzakein discuss the release of WordPress 6.9, including new features like block-level collaboration and accessibility improvements. They cover WordPress community news, ongoing Black Friday deals, trending plugins, and the growing impact of AI. The episode also highlights awards within the WordPress space and the rise of WordPress in non-English markets, especially Asia. The panel shares laughs, personal stories, and their appreciation for contributors driving the platform forward.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Dave Grey about Nag Me Not, a plugin and browser extension designed to clean up WordPress admin screens by removing nagging banners and ads. The conversation explores the unique approach Dave is taking to market and sell the tool, partnering with hosting providers and service companies to offer Nag Me Not as a free benefit to their customers, potentially reducing support payloads and enhancing the user experience. They discuss this sponsorship-based model, its benefits for hosts, and invite listener insights on pricing and distribution.
In "This Week in WordPress Episode 357," Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Steve Burge, and Marcus Burnette cover a playful Cards Against Humanity Black Friday sale, Michelle’s tech award nomination, and the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release. They discuss the return of a three-release cycle for WordPress, plans for core AI integration, and recent Cloudflare outages. Other topics include WordPress security mishaps, accessibility, PublishPress plugin updates, creating a Wapuu for WordCamp Asia, and the new AI Experiments canonical plugin. The episode blends WordPress news, community events, and lively discussion. Oh, and dad jokes!
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Jonathan Jernigan about Pie Calendar, a simple-yet-powerful WordPress event calendar plugin. They discuss the plugin’s evolution, including major new features like Eventbrite and ICS calendar integration for easy ticketing and syncing with external calendars. Jonathan also shares insights into his WordPress-focused community and YouTube channel. The conversation highlights Pie Calendar’s user-friendly setup, flexibility for different organisations, and the team’s focus on simplicity. Future plans for additional integrations are teased, as well as stories of how a wide range of clients, from breweries to city councils, use the plugin. Go listen...
In this episode, I'm joined by Taco Verdonschot, Jonathan Bossenger, Birgit Pauli-Haack to discuss WordPress 6.9, including new blocks, performance improvements, accessibility updates, and upcoming live events to help users prepare for the release. The panel pays tribute to WordPress contributor Zeel Thakkar, and covers news about a new leader at Jetpack, Black Friday deals, and community appreciation initiatives. They also highlight developer resources and recent plugin launches, making this a comprehensive update on what's happening in the WordPress ecosystem.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Rodolfo Melogli about the growing isolation in the WooCommerce and WordPress communities due to remote work and AI, and his mission to “bring humans back” through in-person interaction. Rodolfo shares his journey as a WooCommerce expert, the challenges of working remotely, and the inspiration for organising Checkout Summit, a people-focused, content-rich WooCommerce event in Palermo designed to foster genuine connections, collaboration, and community in a relaxed, inclusive setting. If you’ve been feeling the effects of remote work and the rise of automation, or simply want a better way to connect with your fellow WordPress peers, this episode is for you.
In "This Week in WordPress #355," Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, and Rhys Wynne discuss the Kagi search engine, Michelle's job search, and WordPress updates including 6.9’s new features like collaborative editing and abilities API. The episode covers the challenges faced by open source projects like FFmpeg, security concerns with AI-powered tools such as Telex, the Global Partner Program for WordPress event sponsorships, and developments in full site editing, highlighting the Ollie theme. Listener comments add depth to discussions about the future and risks of WordPress plugin and block creation through AI.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Nick Hamze, a quirky and creative force in the WordPress community. Nick shares his unconventional journey from law school to working at Automattic, running a wildly successful Pokémon card shop, and building unique WordPress blocks using AI tools like Telex. Their conversation gets into the joy of creating weird, fun projects, the empowering possibilities of AI for non-coders, and the importance of injecting creativity and personal touch back into the web. If you’ve wondered how AI tools can transform your workflow, felt weighed down by the pressure to build serious, polished things, or just want to be reminded why fun and experimentation are so important in WordPress, this episode is for you. Go listen...
On this episode of WP Builds, Natalie MacLees joins Nathan Wrigley to talk about the new accessibility tool, Aaardvark Accessibility. They discuss Natalie’s background in web accessibility, the evolution and importance of accessible web design, and how their SaaS platform helps agencies and developers find, fix, and monitor accessibility issues across client websites. The conversation also covers practical and moral reasons for improving accessibility, details about automated and manual testing, reporting features, explanations in plain English, and pricing plans.
In this WP Builds podcast episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Amadeu Arderiu about three innovative WordPress AI projects: ploogins.com, an AI-powered search engine for both free and premium plugins. Joinchat, a plugin that adds an AI chatbot to your site, answering queries using your website's content. And Suggerence, an experimental tool that lets users interact with, and build inside, the Gutenberg block editor using AI-driven natural language and even drawings! They discuss technical challenges, future possibilities, monetisation, and the evolving role of AI in WordPress. Go listen...
This episode covers WordPress 6.9’s new features and testing guide, major UK cyber attacks, security insights, and why Malwarebytes chose WordPress. The panel discusses plugin lifetime deals, the rise of newsletters, and the pros and cons of web design trends. AI’s impact on WordPress is explored, including new agentic browser capabilities and WS Form’s integration with Elementor’s AI agent. The episode also highlights collaborative editing in WordPress, a dramatic smart bed malfunction due to AWS outage, and the importance of owning your data, plus fun detours like the year’s best animal photos.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Matt Cromwell about his recent article on the future of WordPress product businesses. Matt shares his evolving passion for the WordPress plugin ecosystem, discusses anxieties around the future, especially user expectations and the rise of AI, and highlights the importance of better UI/UX and partnering with marketers and designers. The episode talks about how focusing on user experience and collaboration can help WordPress products thrive, even as the landscape shifts. Plenty of humour and mentions of Matt’s podcast WP Product Talk are sprinkled throughout! A LOT! Go listen!
"This Week in WordPress #353" covers the AWS outage and its impact on major online services, WordPress security trends (including Wordfence and Patchstack reports), upcoming features in WordPress 6.9 (like block visibility controls and the accordion block), the Blocktober project by Tammie Lister, and discussions on plugin/UI design trends and product advice. The panel also celebrates WordCamp Canada, accessibility efforts, and highlights AI’s role in WordPress development. There's a lot more than this, so have a listen...
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jonathan Bossinger, a developer advocate at Automattic, about his journey into WordPress and developer relations (DevRel). Jonathan shares how his passion for teaching led him from software development to DevRel, explains the varied roles within DevRel, and discusses the importance of both technical skills and the ability to teach and communicate effectively. The conversation covers team collaboration, feedback processes in open source, and advice for those interested in pursuing a similar path. Jonathan emphasises humility, adaptability, and a love for helping others as key traits for success in DevRel.
This episode dives into the debate over the WordPress mascot Wapuu, discussing its value to the community versus criticisms about its professionalism. The panel explores the possibility of Ollie’s Menu Designer joining WordPress core, shares insights on plugin marketing and discoverability, highlights the new blueprint feature in WordPress Studio for easily sharing site setups, and reviews a flurry of upcoming WordPress events. Plus, they touch on the launch of Fluent Cart as a new e-commerce solution and discuss branding, community, and engaging content in the WordPress ecosystem.
In this episode of WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley interviews Amber Hinds, CEO of Equalize Digital, about her comprehensive 2025 WordPress page builder accessibility comparison research project. Amber explains her background in accessibility, the meaningful motivation behind her work, and the in-depth methodology of her study, which tested 19+ page builders for accessibility issues. They discuss the importance of accessible website tools, key findings, and the ongoing need for improvement in the WordPress ecosystem. Amber also highlights that accessible tools still require knowledgeable implementation for truly inclusive websites. If you want to understand not just which page builder is technically the most accessible, but also what it takes to critically evaluate, improve, and select tools for accessible WordPress development, this episode is for you.
This episode of "This Week in WordPress" dives into the nature of randomness in computers, highlights upcoming WordPress and tech events, and discusses the WordPress 6.8.3 security release. The panel explores Tammie Lister’s "Blocktober" project, new experiments to improve plugin discoverability, and updates on WP Accessibility Day, including a new accessibility knowledge base. They celebrate the free release of the Ollie Menu Designer plugin and touch on community news including PodcasterPlus, a local meetup, Bluesky’s patent pledge, and ongoing discussions about codes of conduct in open source communities.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Pradeep Sonawane about WebAuditor IO, a SaaS tool designed to help developers, agencies, and non-technical users quickly identify and fix website performance issues. Pradeep shares the origin story of the tool, how it evolved from an internal CLI project to a user-friendly SaaS with AI-powered insights, and its usefulness for WordPress sites. They discuss current features, integration plans, audience scope, and pricing, as well as the potential for future developments like a WordPress plugin and deeper workflow integration.
Check out WebAuditor IO for a closer look at the tool in action, and stay tuned for a conversation that’s sure to inspire you to take your website optimisation to the next level!
Episode 350 of TWiW, hosted by Nathan Wrigley, tackled key topics in the WordPress ecosystem, including updates on RT Camp’s GoDAM plugin, Site Spotlight site reviews, and upcoming features in WordPress 6.9. The panel discussed WordPress’s marketing struggles, the “cool kids” debate, community events calendar conflicts, and recent layoffs at major agencies like 10Up. Notable news included Shopify’s new WordPress plugin and WooCommerce’s POS app launch. Accessibility initiatives and innovative plugins were also highlighted, reflecting the ongoing evolution and challenges in the WordPress community.
In this episode of WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley welcomes back Sebastian Webb to discuss his new WordPress product, Amender. Sebastian explains how Amender lets users visually and non-destructively edit any content or styling on WordPress sites, regardless of which builder or theme created it, using both an intuitive interface and AI-assisted commands. The conversation covers Amender’s technical approach, AI integration, unique licensing model, ideal use cases, and practical examples. Amender is positioned as a flexible amendment tool, not a full page builder, and offers a generous, security-focused pricing structure.
In episode #349 of "This Week in WordPress," Dave Gray, Nathan Wrigley, Tammie Lister, and Tim Nash discuss the latest happenings in the WordPress community. They cover recent software updates, highlight new features and plugins, and share insights on design trends and website security. The hosts also dive into community news, ongoing projects, and future developments within the WordPress ecosystem, offering their perspectives and experiences as longtime contributors and users.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Olly Bowman about his new WordPress plugin, ShutterPress, designed for photographers to easily sell prints and digital downloads through WooCommerce without the hassle of creating individual products for each image. Olly explains how the plugin streamlines gallery and product management, supports password protection, watermarking, and future features like CDN storage, print service integration, and AI-powered image recognition. Whether you’re a professional photographer or want an easy gallery solution, ShutterPress offers both flexible display options and e-commerce functionality.
In episode 348 of This Week in WordPress, the panel dives into upcoming WordPress events, new features in Gutenberg (like the accordion block), and AI’s growing role in translation plugins. They discuss changes in the hosting landscape, including leadership updates, and touch on the legal battles between major players in the WordPress space. The conversation segues into community topics, conference planning woes, and even an amusing detour about alligators in Florida. It’s a lively blend of WordPress news, product updates, industry trends, and plenty of good-humoured tangents.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Amir Helzer, founder of WPML and Toolset, about the evolution of WordPress translation tools. Amir discusses how AI and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised website and software translation, allowing WPML’s new Private Translation Cloud (PTC) to deliver highly accurate, context-aware translations in over 50 languages. They delve into the technical side, user experience improvements, quality guarantees, and the exciting impact of AI on multilingual website management and software localisation. If you’re interested in the future of multilingual WordPress sites, curious about how AI is reshaping global content, or want to learn what it takes to deliver personalised, context-aware translations at scale, then this episode is for you.
Here we go again. It's Monday and that means This Week in WordPress. Your weekly, fun recap of the WordPress news.
This episode features Nathan Wrigley, Courtney Robertson, Tim Nash, and Rhys Wynne discussing recent developments in WordPress. Key topics include the rise of AI in the WordPress ecosystem, reflections on the evolution and diversity of WordPress editors, major events like WordCamp US and local meetups, plugin team stats and automation, security trends, and the intersection of collaboration tools with WordPress. The panel also spotlights creative web projects, new performance initiatives, and lively community banter, blending technical insights with a friendly, engaging atmosphere.
In this episode of WP Builds “At The Core,” Nathan Wrigley, Birgit Pauli-Haack, and Anne McCarthy recap recent and upcoming WordPress core developments. They highlight the roadmap to WordPress 6.9, including simplified site editing mode, block-level commenting, template management improvements, the expanded command palette, speculative loading, and upcoming core blocks. The discussion dives into efforts around admin redesign and foundational work for better AI integration, aiming for more accessible and developer-friendly future WordPress releases. The episode ends with enthusiasm for the WordPress Campus Connect initiative, encouraging community engagement and innovation. Whether you’re a developer, an agency, a solo site builder, or someone passionate about the open web, this episode is for you.
In episode #346 of "This Week in WordPress," Nathan Wrigley is joined by Taco Verdonschot, Dave Grey, and Alex Osmuchenko for a lively discussion covering the latest in WordPress and beyond. The panel dives into upcoming features in Gutenberg 21.5, including the new accordion block and command palette, while sharing perspectives on the ongoing WP Engine vs. Automattic legal saga. They highlight the launch of the F.A.I.R. package manager site, growing educational initiatives like WordPress credits in Costa Rica, and a packed schedule of upcoming WordCamps and WP Accessibility Day. The team also explores the new Telex tool for building blocks with AI, a revealing page builder accessibility report, and Rocket.net’s partnership with Hosting.com. As usual, there’s plenty of banter, travel tales from WordCamp US, and an airport security story involving a suspicious Wapuu card game. Dive in for news, community, and plenty of WordPress insights!
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Ross Morsali, creator of the popular WordPress plugin Search & Filter. Ross shares the origin story of the plugin, its evolution from a free tool to a full-fledged business, and how it enables advanced faceted search and filtering on WordPress sites. They discuss technical integrations (like ACF, various page builders, and Gutenberg), scalability, onboarding improvements, future features, and Ross's commitment to long-term support. The conversation offers insight into both the challenges and opportunities of building a complex, widely used WordPress product.
Ahoy, it's Monday again, and you know what that means? This Week in WordPress - the best place for a roundup of WordPress news. Today. I'm with Michelle Frechette, Dave Grey and Miriam Schwab. This episode covers the latest WordPress news, including Gutenberg updates, community trends, and the state of the WordPress ecosystem. The panel discusses new AI tools like Angie, the launch of WPWiki, plugin developments, and positive signs from global WordPress events. They address WordPress’s reputation, event attendance, youth engagement, and hosting news like Jess Frick joining Rocket.net. The hosts reflect on the challenges and optimism within the community, sharing insights into initiatives supporting students, plugin innovation, and upcoming events, highlighting their confidence in WordPress’s ongoing growth and adaptability.
In this episode of WP Builds' "Feeling Insecure," Nathan Wrigley and WordPress security consultant Tim Nash discuss the rising impact of AI on internet and WordPress security. They explore how AI is being used both by hackers to rapidly exploit vulnerabilities and generate sophisticated phishing emails, and by defenders to counter threats. They highlight recent industry reports, the cat-and-mouse dynamics of cybersecurity, and the role of hosting companies in mitigation. Tim also plugs his WordPress Security 101 course. If you want to understand the new ways AI is shaping security threats (and defences) in the WordPress ecosystem, or if you’re curious about what’s changed in phishing and plugin vulnerabilities, this episode is for you.
Another week, and we're bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days. I'm with Jess Frick, Rob Cairns. This episode covers the latest WordPress news, including updates to the Block Editor, the future of neglected blocks, and the launch of the Abilities API. The panel discusses what it takes to succeed as a WordPress plugin vendor, Divi’s ongoing popularity and development, and changes ahead for WordCamp US, including a more interactive Contributor Day. They debate the state and future of WP Tavern and the challenges of maintaining independent journalism in WordPress. Other highlights include plugin repository issues, the importance of authentic marketing, and opportunities for community involvement in accessibility and development teams.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Dave Gray about his journey transitioning from a corporate career to running his own WordPress focused business. Dave discusses his decision to create utility plugins like Administrator Toolkit and Nag Me Not, aimed at helping freelancers and site maintainers manage client sites more effectively. He also talks about his other projects like Launch That Website, demonstrating his focus on small, purposeful tools rather than all in one solutions. The conversation covers the challenges of deciding which features to add, building a product ecosystem, and balancing work-life as an entrepreneur. If you’re managing client sites, building WordPress plugins, or looking for ways to make your WordPress admin life simpler and more secure, this episode is for you.
This week I'm joined by Mark Westguard, Jesse Friedman, Marc Benzakein. We cover the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release, including new features like enhanced site editing, improved template management, block-level visibility, and built-in AI integration. The panel also discusses the declining activity in WordPress testing, the evolving WordPress admin redesign, and the importance of owning your online influence in a world dominated by third-party platforms. News about the upcoming WordCamp US, Automatic’s 20-year milestone, gatekeeping in the WP creator community, and the impact of AI on documentation and workflows round out the episode.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Matt Schwartz, founder of CheckView, a SaaS platform designed to automate testing of WordPress forms and WooCommerce checkouts. Matt explains how CheckView helps agencies and site owners ensure forms work properly by simulating real user interactions, catching issues before customers do. They discuss features, supported plugins, integration challenges with security tools like Cloudflare, and how automated monitoring can prevent lost sales or leads due to unnoticed form failures. The episode also touches on pricing, agency use cases, and CheckView’s expanding roadmap. If you’ve ever experienced the embarrassment, or financial consequences, of a broken form or silent checkout failure, or if you’re simply looking for ways to make your processes more bulletproof and client-friendly, you’ll definitely want to tune in.
This Week in WordPress #342, titled "AI is Lit," dives deep into the rapid integration of AI into the WordPress ecosystem. Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Andrew Palmer, and Rob Cairns discuss new community initiatives like WP Includes Me and WP Trailbodies, recent accessibility improvements in WooCommerce, and upcoming events. The main focus is on the transformative impact of AI projects, such as the new Abilities API, agentic plugins, and tools from Elementor and Hostinger. The panel also explores the implications of AI on design, security, and content creation in the WordPress space.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Robert Abela of MelaPress about managing WordPress user roles and capabilities. Robert shares insights on the importance of granular role control for site security and accountability, introducing their new free plugin, MelaPress Role Editor, which lets users create, customise, and assign multiple roles and capabilities. They discuss real-world scenarios, UX improvements, and future plans for enhanced features. Listeners learn how to streamline WordPress permissions, avoid security risks, and improve site management with user-friendly tools. If you’ve ever wanted more control over your site’s access, need to lock down who can touch what (and how), or just want to avoid the all-too-common admin free-for-all, this episode is for you.
In episode #341 of "This Week in WordPress," Nathan Wrigley is joined by Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash, and Tammie Lister to discuss the latest WordPress and tech news. Key topics include WordPress’s new AI integration roadmap, advancements in AI for healthcare, a recent security issue with Gravity Forms, and the push for a decentralised plugin repository. They also review recent and upcoming WordPress events, talk about plugins and core updates, and reflect on community stories. The episode balances technical discussion, community highlights, fun banter, and a touch of “doomsaying” about web security and browser competition. Check it out!
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Aurélien Denis about MailerPress, an upcoming WordPress plugin for sending email campaigns directly from your site. Aurélien explains how MailerPress mimics the Gutenberg UI, uses custom blocks for email creation, and integrates features like branding with theme JSON and querying WordPress content (including WooCommerce products). The plugin stores contacts in custom tables and allows flexible email delivery via popular services. They're seeking beta testers and hint at future AI and automation features.
In this episode of "This Week in WordPress" #340, Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Tammie Lister, and Piccia Neri discuss community news and updates, including the gamification of WP World, a new accessibility podcast, and the maintaine.rs open-source story collection. They cover WordPress project news, calls for contributors for versions 6.9 and 6.8.2, responses to the Matt Mullenweg / WP Engine controversy, and the launch of a WordPress contribution internship program. The panel also highlights independent WordPress events, a proposal for phased plugin updates, and growth in block-based themes like Ollie, along with broader tech and community reflections.
In this episode of WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley talks with Katie Keith, founder and CEO of Barn2 Plugins, about their new partnership with Setary, a SaaS bulk editing tool for WooCommerce products. Katie shares the story behind the partnership, how Setary streamlines bulk product edits through a spreadsheet interface, and its time-saving benefits for both technical and non-technical users. They also discuss plans for a Shopify version and upcoming features like scheduling. Katie touches on integration with custom fields, pricing, and special offers for existing Barn2 customers.
In "This Week in WordPress #339," Nathan Wrigley is joined by Zach Stepek, Tim Nash, and Remkus de Vries to discuss new educational WordPress courses on security and performance, as well as Nathan’s new Podcaster Plus plugin seeking beta testers. The panel covers the upcoming WP Awards, lower-than-expected WordCamp US ticket sales, and the paused Tumblr-to-WordPress migration. They highlight updates to the WordPress developer blog, a new plugin called Better Loops, and whether default themes should be paused. We also have a lively debate on event sponsorships, AI’s impact on content, and practical WordPress community updates.
On the podcast today we have Daniela Soibelman from Elementor, but we're not talking about the Page Builder, we're talking about a new plugin for website accessibility. It's called Ally, and it's a new web accessibility plugin. Daniela explains her journey at Elementor, the inspiration behind Ally, and how the plugin helps WordPress users create more accessible websites with features like usability widgets, compliance statements, and future plans for AI-powered accessibility scans and remediation. Ally works with any WordPress site, not just Elementor-built pages, aiming to make web accessibility simpler and more achievable for everyone. Whether you’re running a small blog or managing sites for clients, this episode will help you understand not just what Ally offers right now, but where it’s headed, making accessibility a shared, achievable goal for everyone working on the web.
In this episode, I talk with Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead, creators of the Independent Analytics WordPress plugin. We discuss how the plugin offers privacy-focused, GDPR-compliant analytics entirely within your WordPress dashboard, no external servers, tracking, or cookies involved. The plugin is designed for simplicity and deep WordPress integration, providing easy-to-understand reports on visitors, referrers, devices, and more. We cover features, performance, third-party integrations, support, upcoming roadmap items, and pricing, emphasising user privacy, straightforward setup, and responsive support from the small team behind the product. Listen in for practical advice, behind-the-scenes details, and plenty of inspiration for putting privacy and simplicity first in your WordPress analytics workflow.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 16th June 2025. With Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Steve Burge, Jesse Friedman.
In this episode, I with veteran podcaster Bob Dunn about the evolution of podcasting, especially within the WordPress and WooCommerce spaces. We discuss their early audio influences, the growth and accessibility of podcasting, and dive into the technical side, from microphones and editing software to production workflows. Bob explains his pivot from hosting to managing the multi-host "Do the Woo" podcast channel, shares repurposing tips, and we both reflect on content creation, podcast longevity, and how WordPress seamlessly powers our sites. Whether you’re a podcaster already, a WordPress professional, or someone just looking for inspiration to start something new, this episode is for you.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 9th June 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Remkus de Vries, Piccia Neri, Tim Nash as we chat about the WordPress news from the previous week. We dive into the launch of FAIR, a new decentralised package manager that could shift plugin distribution away from WordPress.org. The panel also discusses the formation of an official WordPress AI team, what it could mean for the project, and recaps highlights from WordCamp Europe. Other topics include new plugin releases like FluentCart (a WooCommerce competitor) and user experience improvements, along with updates on various speaker projects. The tone is lively, oh and there's pictures of Mark Westguard on a phone!
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Brad Williams about his longstanding role in the WordPress community and the launch of Theme Switcher Pro, a plugin that lets you run multiple themes on a single WordPress site. Brad explains how it helps sites transition from the classic editor to the block editor without a complete rebuild and discusses various creative and enterprise use cases. The conversation also covers WordPress agency culture, plugin pricing, and the importance of community support and trust in product launches. So, if you’re fascinated by the intersection of WordPress development, product innovation, and business strategy, or if you just want a peek at what’s possible with your next big site migration, this episode is for you.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, Nathan Wrigley and Rae Morey recap major WordPress news from the past quarter. They discuss key events like PressConf, CloudFest, WordCamp Asia, and the new altctrl.org event. Highlights include changes to Oxygen and Elementor page builders, plugin and hosting acquisitions, the launch of StellarSites, diversity challenges in WordPress leadership, the shift to one major WordPress release per year, AI-powered tools, accessibility debates, and the reinstatement of previously banned community members. If you're curious to know what's been happening in the WordPress space over the lsat few months, this episode is for you.
In "This Week in WordPress #335," Nathan Wrigley is joined by Tim Nash, Tammie Lister, and Piccia Neri to discuss rebuilding trust in the WordPress community, recent reforms proposed by Executive Director Mary Hubbard, and comparisons between WordPress and Drupal governance. The panel dives into the surge of plugin submissions, largely fueled by AI-generated plugins, and the challenges this poses for moderation and quality control. They also touch on accessibility initiatives, the importance of kindness in community interactions, and showcase new and interesting WordPress blocks and tools.
In this episode, I chat with Zach Hendershot about Miruni, an AI-powered tool designed to streamline edit requests for WordPress agencies. Miruni lets clients mark up website changes via screenshots, then uses AI to automate most updates. Agencies just review and approve. Zach explains how Miruni handles various content types, including Elementor, and upcoming features like video and audio requests. We also discuss Miruni’s simple SaaS pricing model, its focus on saving agencies significant time, and the importance of keeping humans in the approval loop for quality control. If you're an agency and could do with saving a little bit of time with your client requests, perhaps Miruni is worth a look?
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th May 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Remkus de Vries, Tim Nash, Corey Maass as we discuss the news from the last 7 days. We dive into speed optimisation, with Remkus de Vries sharing why image optimisation isn’t everything. The panel discusses AI’s growing role in WordPress, accessibility, the end of the WordPress Media Corps, notable community updates, and new plugins like a media library tool and cart sidebar for WooCommerce. We also get into issues with Figma Sites’ code, WordCamp event updates, and the importance (and pitfalls) of obsessing over optimisation scores. It's all coming up on This Week in WordPress.
In this episode of WP Builds’ “At the Core,” Nathan Wrigley is joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack and Fabian Kaegy to discuss recent developments in WordPress, especially the 6.8 release. They highlight new features like enhanced details / accordion blocks, improvements to the style book, pattern section styles, gallery image expansion, and template editing. The conversation also covers the shift to slower, more focused WordPress core releases, changes in the development process, and new plugins such as ClassifAI and ThemeSwitcher Pro, which help with AI integration and gradual block theme migration. If you want to keep up with the changing pace of WordPress core development and get practical takes on the latest features, this episode is for you.
Episode 333 of "This Week in WordPress," hosted by Nathan Wrigley with guests Wendie Huis in t Veld, Dave Grey, and John Overall, covers WordPress news and community updates. They discuss canonical plugins, particularly their use for accessibility improvements and the debate over whether such features should be in WordPress core or as separate plugins. WordPress 6.8.1's release is highlighted, along with the upcoming Page Builder Summit and speaking opportunities at WPLDN. The episode touches on challenges in launching and marketing new WordPress products, strategies for broader reach, and the newly updated WordPress Mercantile swag store. Other topics include observations from the recent PressConf event, reinstating previously banned WordPress.org contributor accounts, trends in global WordPress contributions, emerging email tools like MailerPress, and both the benefits and frustrations of AI in customer support. The hosts emphasise inclusivity, community growth, and the evolving landscape of WordPress.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Arpit G Shah, founder of Creative Work Designs, about WPSyncSheets plugins. Arpit shares how his tools enable bi-directional syncing of WordPress and WooCommerce data with Google Sheets, making tasks like import/export, inventory management, and bulk edits easier, no need to manage data directly within WordPress. He also discusses pricing, large-scale data handling, upcoming AI features, and future plans for integrating with other platforms like Airtable. This episode is perfect for anyone looking to streamline WordPress and WooCommerce data workflows. If you’re a WordPress or WooCommerce user who relies on Google Sheets, or wishes their site and their spreadsheets “just talked to each other”, this episode is for you.
Another week, and we're bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days. Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette and Tim Nash. We cover the PressConf event highlights, discuss the new Theme Switcher Pro plugin, and explore Joost’s reflections on unintended consequences in SEO tools. We share updates on Patchstack security alerts, and WordPress 6.8, mention upcoming events like WordCamp Canada, and introduce Tim Nash’s new WordPress security course. There's chat about new tools including BetterFox for Firefox and WP Descriptor for AI-generated image alt tags. The episode is lighthearted, featuring fun audience banter inspired by a mysterious “of the chickens” sign, as well as practical and community news from the WordPress ecosystem.
In this episode, I talk with Gabriella Laster, Product Marketing Director at Elementor, about the upcoming Elementor v4 release. Gabriella explains why a major codebase rewrite was needed, highlighting significant performance improvements, a new CSS-first approach, more intuitive UI changes, and enhanced workflow features. She reassures existing users that v3 and v4 will coexist, ensuring a smooth transition without breaking sites. The episode also covers their commitment to developer documentation, ongoing user education, and no planned pricing changes. You can expect incremental rollouts throughout 2025 with opportunities to participate in early testing. If you rely on Elementor for your livelihood, or even just your own website, and want to know what Elementor v4 will mean for you, this episode is for you.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 14th April 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Mark Westguard, Wendie Huis in 't Veld, Steve Burge as we talk about the WordPress news from this week. We discuss the upcoming Page Builder Summit, the release of WordPress 6.8 (the only major update for 2025), and new features like speculative loading for faster page speed. We explore the environmental and practical impacts of prefetching, the shift to an annual WordPress release cadence, and concerns about AI’s growing role in web development. The panel also touches on community events like WordCamp Europe, the importance of human connection, and shares news about plugins, accessibility tools, and open-source site projects.
Today, I'm chatting with Sherry Holub about her journey in the WordPress space. Sherry discusses her background in art, transitioning from graphic design to running her own agency and her early adoption of WordPress for custom designs. We talk about how she utilises custom fields to build unique, easily modifiable websites tailored to client needs. Sherry highlights the importance of balancing creativity with functionality and shares how her approach caters to small businesses and nonprofits. The conversation also touches on the evolving nature of web design and WordPress's adaptability. Go Listen...
In "This Week in WordPress #330," Nathan Wrigley, Taco Verdonshot, Piccia Neri, and Corey Maas discuss various topics, starting with Google wanting merchants to share marketing emails for better service insights. Piccia introduces Canva's expansion into website building and promotes her course on accessible data visualisations. Corey presents his new Chrome extension, Pause Tab, designed to help manage browser tabs more effectively. The episode also highlights the sale of the Newsletter Glue plugin by Leslie Sim, stressing its impact on the WordPress community. Additionally, there's excitement around WP APAC, a new collective for WordPress professionals in the Asia Pacific. They discuss WordPress 6.8's upcoming release, the final for 2025, and the implications of reduced WordPress releases' perception. Lastly, the conversation touches on controversial ads appearing in the block editor and Progress Planner's integration with Yoast SEO for improved site maintenance.
In this episode of "The Nice Show" from WP Builds, hosts Nathan Wrigley and Mark Westguard discuss the importance of positivity. They share stories of meeting nice people, like Derek Ashauer and Miriam Schwab, and mention useful WordPress plugins like Conversion Bridge. They explore online tools like Loveable for web design and highlight community events like PressConf, WP Accessibility Day, and the Page Builder Summit. The conversation lightens with real-world anecdotes, delightful short videos, and curious news about bringing extinct animals back to life, all in the spirit of spreading niceness.
The WordPress news from the last week with Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Tammie Lister, Tim Nash. We discuss a variety of WordPress topics. Michelle launches a new events-focused podcast with Bob WP, and starts a weekly series of talks at Post Status. We explore potential alternatives to Figma, Automattic's recent workforce restructuring, and the implications of a reduced WordPress release cadence. We also cover upcoming events like Press Conf and the Page Builder Summit, and discuss the challenges of engaging Gen Z with WordPress, highlighting the need for modern design and effective communication.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan talks with guests Wes Tatters and Mike Eisenwasser about Rapyd Cloud, a high-performance hosting solution for dynamic WordPress sites. Wes, the managing director, developed the infrastructure designed to dynamically scale resources based on demand. Mike, the co-founder and chief product officer, details their focus on sites needing significant resources, like social networks and e-commerce platforms. They offer managed WordPress hosting with advanced security and performance monitoring. Rapyd's pricing starts at $50/month, appealing to serious site owners seeking robust, scalable, and efficient hosting solutions. So, if you’ve been seeking a reliable, high-performance, and dynamic hosting solution for your WordPress site, this episode might just provide the answers you’re looking for with Rapyd Cloud as a promising option on the horizon.
Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Corey Maass, Bob Dunn as they discuss the WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 24th March 2025. There's a lot to talk about but also a lot of technical gremlins! We discuss various topics related to WordPress, including accessibility, AI, and recent news in the WordPress community. Featured items include the new Elementor A11Y tool, the announcement of the Page Builder Summit, and updates on WordPress 6.8 accessibility improvements. We also delve into the practicalities of using AI in website development and recap highlights from the CloudFest hackathon.
In this episode of WP Builds entitled "Feeling Insecure? Episode #3," Nathan Wrigley and Tim Nash explore various aspects of WordPress security. Tim shares insights into his background in cybersecurity, including his past experience with physical penetration testing. We discuss the Patchstack report on WordPress security, noting an increase in vulnerabilities but reassuring listeners that more vulnerabilities being found isn't necessarily alarming. We get into the complexity of vulnerabilities, security measures like hashing and encryption, and changes coming in WordPress 6.8. The episode highlights the importance of updates and ends with a positive outlook on security advancements. It's a tin foil hat episode, and I hope that you enjoy it!
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 17th March 2025. Today we're joined by Remkus de Vries, Anna Hurko and Jonathan Overall. We discuss the proposed move to one major WordPress release annually, sparking concerns about developer and user impacts. We explore Visa challenges for WordCamp Asia 2026 attendees and the implications of WordPress's update frequency on market competitiveness. The episode highlights Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth security feature and discusses the pros and cons of speculative loading in WordPress 6.8. Attendees' experiences at CloudFest, a large European event with diverse tech showcases and hackathons, are also shared.
In this WP Builds episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Leonardo Losoviz about his new project, "Gato AI Translations for Polylang." Leo explains how his new plugin leverages the existing Gato GraphQL technology to automate the translation of WordPress content. By connecting to AI services like ChatGPT and Google Translate, the plugin translates posts, pages, and more into various languages, streamlining the process significantly. Leo highlights the plugin's ease of use and flexibility, including the ability to handle complex content types while maintaining the structure. Future plans for additional plugins are also discussed. If you’re currently managing a multilingual site, or if you’ve been curious about the potential of AI in your WordPress projects, this episode is for you.
In this episode of WP Builds, I talk with Akshat Choudhary, founder of Block Vault, about his new product, Airlift. Airlift is a WordPress optimisation tool that promises to speed up websites with the click of a button by automatically implementing performance enhancements like caching, CDN, and image optimisation. Akshat discusses the challenges and importance of making websites faster for user engagement and conversions. Although building Airlift took longer than anticipated, with three-and-a-half years of development, the goal is to make fast websites accessible to everyone, emphasising the impact on user experience and engagement. Go listen.
"Things hard won will not be easily lost" - This Week in WordPress #326. Join Taco Verdonschot, Marieke van de Rakt, Marcus Burnette as we discuss the WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 3rd March 2025.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, Nathan Wrigley and guest Matt Medeiros discuss the role and impact of AI in web development, particularly within WordPress. They explore Matt's journey in developing an app called Pulse WP using various AI tools, such as chat GPT, Claude, Bolt, and Replit. The conversation touches on AI's potential benefits, challenges, and its implications for future web development. They also consider how AI may democratise technology but express concerns about its rapid growth and the need for understanding and adaptation within the WordPress community. Go listen...
Today we're with Michellle Frechette and Andrew Palmer to discuss the WordPress news from the last week.
On the podcast today, we have Simon Harper. He's here to discuss the current challenges and dynamics of the WordPress community. He explores the fragmentation within the community, sparked by tensions from a trademark dispute between WP Engine and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic. The conversation touches on the challenges of managing a large, diverse community, the impact of money in open-source projects, and potential strategies for fostering positivity and unity, such as emphasising contributions and uplifting the community's achievements amidst ongoing disputes. So, if you are interested in the future of WordPress and its community dynamics, this episode is for you.
Today, we're with Tony Zeoli, who shares his journey from being a DJ and club promoter to founding Netmix and developing radio station-related WordPress plugins. Tony discusses the history of Netmix, his experience with streaming audio online in the '90s, and his project's evolution into modern tools for radio stations on WordPress. He highlights the differences between live radio and podcasting, the ongoing relevance of radio, and introduces features of his "Radio Station" and "Radio Station Pro" plugins. Tony also narrates his move to North Carolina and involvement in academia and other startups. Go check it out...
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, I'm joined by Rae Morey once again to discuss various updates in the WordPress community, including the launch of a new event called PressConf, the release of WordPress 6.7, and significant acquisitions like Group One acquiring GT Metrics. We get into the legal battle between Automattic and WP Engine, the sudden shutdown and subsequent reopening of WordPress.org services, and contributions to the WordPress project. Additionally, we touch upon community contributions, the future direction of WordPress development, and even mention innovations in quantum computing by Google. Join us for an informative podcast as we explore what just happened in the WordPress world and beyond!
The WordPress news from the last week. Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash and Corey Maass as we talk about the WordPress news from the past 7 days. It's always fun!
In this episode, I interview Daniel Post about his WordPress plugin, Autoblue, designed to integrate Bluesky, a decentralised social network, with WordPress. Daniel shares his background in WordPress development, the recent rise in popularity of Bluesky, and details how Autoblue works, including automatic post sharing and comment synchronisation. We discuss the potential future features, user engagement, and the technical aspects of the Bluesky API. Daniel underscores the plugin's aim to merge social media interaction with website comments to enrich user experience.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 27th January 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Ross Morsali and Cami MacNamara as we talk about the WordPress News from this week.
In this episode of WP Builds, I discuss recent developments in WordPress with guests Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy. They cover several significant updates, including collaborative editing features, phase three of the Gutenberg project, data views, style books, and the evolving WordPress Playground. The conversation highlights the practical applications and future implications of these features for developers and users. Birgit and Anne provide insights into ongoing and upcoming enhancements, aiming to make WordPress more versatile and user-friendly, especially for content creation and collaboration.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 20th January 2025. Join us myself and Mark Westguard, Tim Nash, Marc Benzakein as we chat about the news from the previous 7 days.
In this episode of WP Builds, I'm chatting with Ryan Logan about InfluenceWP, a platform connecting WordPress consumers with trusted partners, deals, and unbiased information. Ryan explains his background in IT and WordPress, the non-affiliation policy of InfluenceWP, and the ethical principles guiding the platform. He discusses the nominal paywall for consumers and collaboration opportunities, emphasising his commitment to community and moral integrity. Despite personal and financial investments, Ryan is motivated by his passion and the desire to give back to the WordPress ecosystem. Whether you’re a WordPress developer, an agency, or someone looking to build your first website, this episode offers insights into how you can find trusted resources and partners through InfluenceWP.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 13th January 2025. Join Nathan Wrigley, Taco Verdonschot, Nicky Bulmer, and Corey Maass as we discuss the WordPress news from the past 7 days.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, "The 'Nice Show' with Mark Westguard - Ep 1", I'm joined by... erm... Mark Westguard to introduce a new, lighthearted show focused on positivity, and silliness. We chat about nice people like Michelle Frechette and Joe Dolson, highlight Mark's recent updates to WS Form, discuss upcoming WordPress community events, and explore the merits of the Bluesky social network. We share personal stories and end with a humorous short video recommendation for those who like burping. The goal is to provide an antidote to online negativity and foster a cheerful atmosphere. I hope that we succeed!
"Singing, weirdness and the week where nothing happened". The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 6th January 2025, with Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash, Corey Maass.
Today's episode cannot be found. It's 404! This is my sad attempt at humour, and it's about as funny as I get, sadly! What actually happens is that Alan Fuller discusses the complexities of transitioning WordPress plugins from shortcodes to blocks, addressing caching issues, Eventbrite API limitations, and the rise of visually-driven tools like Elementor. He reflects on pricing mistakes, AI advancements, and balancing development with user preferences, while continuing to support his successful plugin business. Join us as we explore these themes in-depth, and examine the current landscape, and future directions, of WordPress development.
Today we have an exciting and essential conversation for all WordPress enthusiasts and developers. In this episode, titled "Feeling Insecure? Risks and Regulations", I'm joined by Sir Tim Nash to chat about the crucial topic of WordPress security. It's the second of our new show, which will be dropping about once every quarter. Thanks Tim! From securing your devices to balancing usability with top-notch security, it all gets covered. So, get out your tin foil hats, sit back, un-relax, and let's allow Tim the chance to scare us all silly.
Today, I'm joined by Aaron Bowie, a seasoned WordPress developer based in Aberdeen, Scotland. He's here to talk about his WooCommerce payment gateway plugins, emphasising customer-centric development and the advantages of traditional payment gateways like Barclaycard over Stripe and PayPal. Key topics include PCI compliance, cost considerations, and the complexity of integrating payment solutions. Aaron stresses the importance of seamless onboarding, transparent support, and cost-saving benefits of direct bank connections. He also compares fees and security measures, highlighting the unique offerings of various providers. The overall focus is on providing tailored, reliable payment solutions for e-commerce businesses. Have a listen...
In this WP Builds episode, I chat with Remkus de Vries and dive into website optimisation. Remkus, co-founder of Scanfully, a site health monitoring tool, shares his expertise on caching strategies, optimal hosting, and addressing plugin inefficiencies. He emphasises the importance of integrating performance throughout the build process, not just at the end. Remkus also discusses the upcoming features for Scanfully and highlights useful optimisation tools like Code Profiler and Query Monitor. The conversation underscores that user experience and quick load times are crucial for site success. So join us and have a listen...
Today is a big day. It's episode #400 of the WP Builds podcast. This is an important milestone, and as suck I'm going to do absolutely nothing of any kind whatsoever to celebrate it, aside from this paragraph of text. So there! I'm joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Bud is a WordPress educator and content creator, best known for his educational materials on joyofwp.com. His expertise in WordPress and his engaging instructional style have made him a pillar in the WordPress community. In this episode, we dive deep into Bud's journey, exploring how his passion for teaching and creating content started. We'll also talk about his podcast, "Seriously BUD?" which offers a refreshing departure from traditional WordPress content by focusing on stories and light-hearted conversations. Bud shares his motivation behind starting the podcast and the joy he finds in uncovering fascinating personal stories from his guests. So, join us as we celebrate Bud Kraus’s contributions to the WordPress ecosystem, share some intriguing personal stories, and gain insight into what makes the WordPress community so special.
Joining us is Joost de Valk, the mastermind behind the immensely popular Yoast SEO plugin. But today, Joost is here to share his latest project, Progress Planner - a tool designed to revolutionise the way we maintain and update our websites. Imagine a blend between a "Fitbit for websites" and Duolingo. That's precisely what Progress Planner aims to be, combining gamification techniques with practical maintenance strategies to keep users engaged and their sites up-to-date. In our chat, Joost unveils the features, from special badges and weekly activity emails to a task management dashboard right inside of WordPress. We explore how these elements work together to reduce procrastination and make website upkeep a fun, interactive endeavour. So, whether you're a non-tech-savvy business owner struggling to keep your site relevant, an agency looking for ways to enhance client interaction, or someone simply curious about innovative WordPress tools, this episode has something for you.
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley and Rae Morey discuss key events in the WordPress community. Highlights include an automated plugin review system achieving zero backlog, the expansion of the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship to WordCamp Europe and Asia, and HeroPress' call for sponsorship. They address the ongoing conflict between Automattic and WP Engine, including legal disputes and community fallout, alongside the departure of WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomposy and Mary Hubbard's new leadership. Despite the drama, the episode offers insights into WordPress's design updates, featured events, and efforts to improve gender diversity. Check it out...
In this episode of WP Builds, I'm joined by Ben Butler, who runs the Headless Hostman static WordPress hosting solution. Ben shares insights on their approach to enhancing security and performance for WordPress sites. The challenges faced by sites running things like NitroPack and WooCommerce. And dynamic functionalities managed via CloudFlare. They plan a Shopify plugin extension soon, and are actively developing a WooCommerce static solution. Their innovative infrastructure boasts high traffic handling and many other features discussed in the episode. Ben also highlights their seamless integrations with Elementor, WP Rocket, and WPML, aiming to help enterprises manage large-scale, traffic-heavy websites effectively.
Today we have the first instalment of our (yet another) new quarterly show. This one is called "At The Core,", and I'll bet you can't guess what it's about!?! Erm... WordPress Core, and all the recent updates that we can squeeze into 45 minutes! For this new show I'm joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack. She's an Automattician, massive fan of Gutenberg, and all around lovely person! She's also the founder of the Gutenberg Times, which you really should check out. In this premiere episode (ha!), we talk about the latest and greatest developments in the WordPress universe; spotlighting WordPress Playground, a revolutionary tool that allows users to effortlessly spin up websites directly in their browsers - no hosting or database required. We discuss its cutting-edge features, including managing multiple sites from one browser and the much-anticipated blueprints for easy site setup. This episode is packed with resources and discussions, so check it out right away...
In this episode we have Topher DeRosia discussing HeroPress, a platform sharing inspiring stories within the WordPress community. Topher highlights HeroPress’ mission to counteract negativity by showcasing WordPress’s potential. He shares truly impactful stories, such as a child in a stock photo symbolising HeroPress’s motivation to help, and individuals like Hari from India who found success through WordPress. Despite funding challenges, Topher remains committed to maintaining the core essays and possibly starting a storytelling podcast, urging support through recurring donations. Check out the episode today!
So, here we are with yet another WP Builds show. Shiny! In this episode, Remkus de Vries discusses building a high-performance WordPress website, emphasising a solid foundation with good hosting and theme selection. He highlights the importance of "bare metal" speed, Time to First Byte, and independent hosting reviews. Remkus recommends starting with the WordPress site editor and tools like the 'Create Block Theme' plugin. He advises against relying on third-party page builders which may induce complexity and vendor lock-in. The conversation stresses early optimisation and concludes with plans for future discussions on extending WordPress capabilities. Check it out...
Matt Laue, founder of Mindspun, discusses how his company aims to revolutionise digital purchases by enabling users to buy products online in seconds using seamless tools like digital wallets and fingerprint scans. He highlights the advantages of reducing checkout time and tackling cart abandonment. Matt shares the complexities behind developing Mindspun's WordPress payment plugin, including integrating block-based design and maintaining compatibility with systems like Stripe. He also reflects on the challenges of standing out in a competitive market and the evolving WordPress community, expressing optimism about its future and adaptability. So, join us as we learn about a possible future for e-commerce and digital wallets!
Tim Nash, seasoned WordPress security expert, launches "Feeling insecure?" podcast discussing tools, legislation, vulnerabilities, and security best practices for WordPress. This show, just like the other new shows I've recently started (and the ones I'm still to unveil) will happen about once a quarter, and this is the first one! We explore a range of pressing security topics. Tim begins by discussing the relevance of tools like Patchstack for comprehensive security and the potential legal ramifications of software vulnerabilities highlighted by new legislation such as the European Cyber Resilience Act. The conversation turns to looking into real-world examples, including the CUPS vulnerability affecting Linux systems, illustrating the far-reaching impact of security flaws (or not!). You'll hear Tim's expert opinion on the topic of 'responsible disclosure' and the recent actions of major security players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. There's loads more, so have a listen...
Today, I'm joined by WordPress security maestro Tim Nash. I'll bet he's never been called that before! He's here to explore his tactics for securing and managing WordPress website deployments. Tim delves into the concept of immutable operating systems, advocating for read-only core files to boost security, particularly for high-traffic, enterprise environments. He also addresses deployment strategies, such as red-green deployments and the utilisation of orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Practical solutions for file management, database efficiency, and mitigating DDoS attacks are highlighted, alongside standard practices like blocking PHP execution in upload directories. The episode offers a blend of technical insights and fun anecdotes, making it essential listening (!!!) for anyone looking to enhance their WordPress site's security and performance. Get the tinfoil hat ready, and a large mug of coffee, just in case!
Todoay, we're with seasoned WordPress developer Derek Ashauer discussing his new product, Conversion Bridge, designed to enhance conversion tracking on WordPress sites. Derek highlights its compatibility with 51 plugins, including WooCommerce and various LMS systems. He explains the easy setup process, flexible site license structures, and robust customer support. Privacy concerns and alternative analytics platforms that comply with global laws are also addressed. Unique user needs and future integrations are covered, providing insights into streamlining analytics and conversion tracking. This episode is packed with information that'll help you simplify your conversion tracking workflow, and make the most out of your WordPress site.
So this is fun! A new show! This is the next one that I'm announcing… The Community Show! It's with Courtney Robertson, who knows more about the WordPress community than almost anyone else I can think of. We're going to be doing this show, just like the other ones (stay tuned, I'll announce them soon too) every 3 months or so. That means that our new podcast hosts won't get burn out, but also we'll have plenty to talk about. So what's this new show about… well… the WordPress community, and all the things that it does. Events, meetups, online sessions, updates and more. Really, this show will encompass almost anything in the WordPress space. It's going to be fun and I'm grateful that Courtney has made some time in her busy schedule to record the show with me. So, whether you're a seasoned WordPress expert or a newcomer eager to dive in, this episode offers a pretty comprehensive look at the ways that you can keep up with the community.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 2nd September 2024. You can find this episode here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/09/10/this-week-in-wordpress-308
Today on the podcast Matthias Pfefferle joins me to discuss the integration of WordPress with the Fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol. Mathias talks about the differences between traditional social media and decentralised networks like Mastodon, focusing on the benefits of ActivityPub for bloggers. He explains how the plugin allows WordPress posts to function as social media posts, enabling direct interactions from various federated platforms without cross-posting. The conversation covers the evolution, technical challenges, and future roadmap of the plugin, including new features like supporting podcasting (yay!) and improving profile editing. Matthias also touches on the broader adoption of Fediverse platforms and their potential for growth. Check it out!
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 26th August 2024. You can find the episode here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/09/03/this-week-in-wordpress-307
Today I chat with Marc Benzakein, a tech industry veteran, as he shares insights on crisis management. Marc recounts a severe cyber security breach during his tenure at a previous company where a hacker demanded $40,000 within 72 hours. He emphasises the importance of honesty, transparency, and clear communication in crisis management. We also discuss the role of proactive security measures and professional handling of cyber threats in a post-9/11 world. The episode underscores the value of gaining customer trust and business sustainability through transparent crisis management. Join me for a sobering and insightful discussion that underscores the need for honesty, preparation, and resilience in the face of security crises. This episode is not just informative but a good listen for anyone looking to understand the intricacies of effective crisis management and customer relations.
So this is really, truly, genuinely exciting for me! Today, we announce a new show "What just happened?" with Rae Morey. Rae, a former newspaper journalist turned web developer, curates top WordPress stories over at The Repository. This, the first episode, discusses Automattic's partnership with Perplexity, educational resources at learn.wordpress.org, logistical improvements for WordCamp events, Uganda's educational initiatives, and the revival of the Cwicly page builder. Rae’s background, motivations, and her wonderful newsletter are highlighted. The episode provides insights and encourages community engagement within the WordPress space as it cast an eye back over the last 3 month in the WordPress space.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th August 2024. You can find the episode here:
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, I chat wih Xaver Birsak, the creator of Mailster, an email marketing plugin for WordPress. Xaver, who has over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, shares his journey from working with Flash, HTML, and JavaScript to developing Mailster, which initially launched in 2012 and recently updated to version 4.0. The discussion covers Xaver's transition from the Envato marketplace to a subscription-based model, detailed features of Mailster such as its drag-and-drop builder and GDPR compliance, and future plans for the plugin. Whether you're a seasoned email marketer or just starting, this conversation is packed with insights on integrating email marketing seamlessly within your WordPress site while maintaining full control over your data. Check it out...
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 5th August 2024. You can find the post here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/08/13/this-week-in-wordpress-305
Today we have Kyle Van Deusen on the podcast. Kyle is not only the founder of the prominent community, The Admin Bar, but also a dedicated WordPress expert who has been deeply engrossed in the industry for years.In this episode, we explore the results of the latest survey conducted by The Admin Bar, which delves into the nitty-gritty of the WordPress ecosystem. With over 1,100 participants, mainly freelancers and agency owners, the survey provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state of the industry.We discuss some key stats, such as how 68% of businesses reported gross revenues under $100,000 in 2023, and how only 10% of freelancers and agency owners are making $100,000 per year.Whether you’re a freelancer, agency owner, or just passionate about web development, this episode provides the insights and benchmarks you need to stay ahead of the curve.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 29th July 2024. You can find the post here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/08/06/this-week-in-wordpress-304
In episode 14 of "The No Script Show," Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley discuss the division between UX designers and JavaScript specialists, focusing on Chris Coyier’s article “The Great Divide.” After halting their work together on the WP Builds podcast, due to David’s shift towards minimalist web development with HTML and CSS, they launched "The No Script Show" to explore this new approach. This episode, the last to be featured on WP Builds, delves into whether the divide between HTML/CSS-first developers and JS framework specialists has narrowed over the years, touching on advancements in CSS, web components, and web standards, and examining ongoing issues such as gatekeeping and accessibility.
In WP Builds Podcast episode #382, Alex Moss discusses his multifaceted career from a self-taught PHP developer in 2011 to Principal SEO at Yoast. The conversation spans his co-founding of an agency, involvement in the NFT market, and views on emerging digital trends. Alex highlights potential practical uses of NFTs beyond speculation, collaboration between marketing and development teams, and advancements at Yoast post-acquisition by Newfold Digital. Key topics include the future of SEO amidst AI and privacy challenges, Google's dominance, the evolution of search engines, and the balancing act of offering premium and free services at Yoast. Go check it out.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 15th July 2024. You can find the post with the links here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/07/23/this-week-in-wordpress-303
In this episode of the WP Builds Podcast, Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley discuss the significant and evolving role of AI on the web, focusing on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) new report titled "AI and the Web, Understanding and Managing the Impact of Machine Learning Models on the Web". The episode delves into AI's dual challenges: data quality and environmental impact. We explore ethical and societal implications, such as privacy, transparency, and the potential for AI to undermine human creativity and entry-level jobs. We also address the importance of standards, regulatory frameworks, and Tim Berners-Lee's optimistic vision of AI, emphasising the need for collaborative and ethical AI development. Go listen...
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 8th July 2024. You can find the post here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/07/16/this-week-in-wordpress-302
On the podcast today, we have Alex Standiford talking about his innovative approach to affiliate programs through his new plugin, Siren Affiliates, which is unlike any other affiliates system you've used. Alex gets into the specifics of Siren and its user interface, explaining how rewards are divided, what actions earn points, and what events trigger point calculations. He emphasises the ability of third-party developers to extend these components, allowing for a high degree of customisation. If you’re interested in a truly new and unique approach to affiliate programs that fosters collaboration and fairness among affiliates, this episode is for you.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 1st July 2024. You can find it here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/07/09/this-week-in-wordpress-301
On the podcast today, David Waumsley and I go a journey through the evolution of web typography! We both admit to feeling a mix of intrigue and intimidation toward typography, traditionally seen as the realm of design experts. We start by acknowledging the historical constraints of web typography and the relevance of its principles, despite the shift to the digital age. We then get into modern practices, such as responsive design and the shift from pixels to rems. We also explore new web typography features, including font size adjust, kerning, and scroll animations, while emphasising the significance of accessibility and internationalisation, particularly for non-Latin languages. Fluid typography and its benefits, like proportional font size changes, are highlighted, along with tools such as the Utopia CSS generator for creating cohesive designs. The practicalities of ensuring readability through proper spacing and underlining are also explored. We wrap up with a look at the shift from system fonts to the abundance of Google Fonts, highlighting the importance of readability and clarity in contemporary web design. For anyone interested in the nuances of modern web typography and responsive design, this episode is for you.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 24th June 2024. You can find it here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/07/02/this-week-in-wordpress-300
In podcast episode #378 of WP Builds, Aaron Edwards discusses his DocsBot AI, a chatbot plugin designed for WordPress customer support. Edwards, former CTO of WPMUDev, shares his journey into AI, highlighting his work on the Imajinn plugin and his pivot to developing DocsBot AI. This AI-based SaaS integrates with various content sources to train custom bots, automating customer ticket responses while ensuring GDPR compliance. The episode covers the technical aspects, integration capabilities, pricing, and future potentials of AI in customer service, making it a valuable listen for WordPress developers and business owners seeking to streamline support workflows.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 17th June 2024 with Remkus de Vries, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Birgit Olzem. You can find the show here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/06/25/this-week-in-wordpress-299
Today we discuss advancements in web image standards and new CSS features. Topics include object fit, aspect ratio, border images, filters, clip path, mask-image, and backdrop filters, which offer alternatives to traditional image editing tools like Photoshop. The episode also covers HTML and CSS considerations, such as img and picture elements, alt tags, and loading attributes. New image formats like WebP and AVIF are examined, along with the use of SVGs for accessibility and performance benefits. Go listen...
In Podcast #376, guest Piccia Neri, a seasoned designer and long-time collaborator with WP Builds, discusses the evolution of her career and the critical role of accessibility in web design. Initially a book designer, Piccia adapted her skills to the digital age, emphasizing accessibility as essential for good UX. The episode explores the importance of starting web design with content and typography, driven by ethical considerations and upcoming legislation like the European Accessibility Act. Piccia shares actionable insights on accessible typography, HTML structuring, and how accessible design can boost SEO. Listeners are offered valuable resources, including a free accessibility primer and workshops.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 27th May 2024. You can find it here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/06/04/this-week-in-wordpress-298
Today we're talking to Marcel Bootsman from Kinsta, discussing Kinsta's static site hosting. We get into the benefits, technical nuances, and environmental sustainability of static site hosting, highlighting its potential to enhance WordPress website speed and efficiency. Marcel explains how Kinsta leverages Cloudflare's global infrastructure and discusses the complexities involved. The conversation also touches on the developer expertise needed and the possibility of integrating dynamic elements into static sites. Kinsta's static hosting emerges as a cost-effective and high-performing alternative to traditional methods, offering insights on getting started and associated costs.
So this is like no podcast episode I've ever done. Normally it's me talking to one, perhaps two, other people... but not today! A few weeks ago I was on a call with Adam Warner and Marcus Burnette from GoDaddy, and we were trying to come with fun ways to celebrate the 21st birth of WordPress, which is on May 27th 2024. This podcast is the result. It's 21 voices from the WordPress world who recorded themselves speaking about their experiences of WordPress; the software, the community, the things that it's enabled for them. And it's wonderful. It's varied, it's interesting, it's encouraging, it's fun! I truly hope that you enjoyed this episode, I enjoyed making it!
Once more we bring you a podcast hijack in which the No Script Show takes over the WP Builds podcast, perhaps for the last time? I confess that I'm enjoying this new project very much indeed!We get into some of the new features that have been added to CSS and what they enable you to do, and how widely supported they are.If you've not listened to the previous 9 episodes, then you won't know that your browser is getting more capable and instead of hacking things together with frameworks and scripts, we can now do many of the 'cool things' with just a smattering of CSS.But what are these CSS things, and how do they allow the user of a web page to have some control in what they see, and how do they enable you, the website builder do do things with less dependencies and in shorter amounts of time?Listen to find out...
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 6th May 2024.
You can find the show notes here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/05/14/this-week-in-wordpress-297
Today we have the pleasure of hosting Alex Borto, a WordPress developer from France.Alex has been part of the WordPress landscape since 2011, educating and inspiring through his popular blog, wpmarmite.com, and a thriving YouTube channel with over 69,000 subscribers.In this episode, Alex will delve into his innovative project, WP Turbo Dev, which has been making waves by significantly enhancing the workflow for WordPress developers through the integration of AI technology.As the founder of WP Turbo Dev, Alex shares insights into how this tool not only accelerates development processes, but also ensures that, even as AI takes on more routine tasks, the art of development remains irreplaceable for more complex demands.We explore the current features, the projected roadmap, and how the tool integrates with popular plugins and themes to provide a comprehensive development experience.Alex also talks about the broader implications of AI in WordPress development, reflecting on how developers can leverage AI to improve their coding efficiency, whilst still maintaining a high standard of creativity and functionality.He’ll also touch on his initial motivations for starting free WordPress code generators, and how incorporating AI has expanded the capabilities and resources available to the community.For both new and experienced developers interested in the future of WordPress and AI, this discussion with Alex Borto promises to be worth a listen.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 29th April 2024. You can find the post here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/05/07/this-week-in-wordpress-296
Back in the day, all the browsers were enemies. They all went off and decided how they would do things with no regard for what their 'rivals' were doing.This was fun and gave us website developers the joy of having to make sure that what you'd built looked decent in most of the popular browsers.If you're as old as me and have been in this game for a while, you'll remember shouting at your monitor when things did not work out as planned - which was all the time. I even had a soft rubber mallet, called "The Hardware Hammer" with which I could beat my computer without the costly repair bill!Fast forward to today and things are much better. Browser vendors all seem to be working towards a common goal, a common spec.But, and there had to be a but... they don't ship all of the feature at the same time. Some browsers support this thing, others don't (yet).In this episode we explore where we can go to find out what new features are available in which browsers, so that you can be sure that the site that you're about to ship works well for everyone, no matter how they're viewing it.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 22nd April 2024. You can find the episode here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/04/27/this-week-in-wordpress-295
On the podcast today we have Stéphane Menet, a seasoned expert with a 20-year background in web strategy and business. He's not only the founder of WP Connect, but also heads a web agency that collaborates with freelancers to build dynamic project teams. His experience runs across a multitude of frameworks and CMS's, it's not all WordPress. We get into the evolving realm of no-code tools, and their impact on content management and web development. Stéphane has crafted a plugin, the Airtable to WordPress plugin, that demonstrates this shift, catering especially to non-technical WordPress users who require an intuitive way to manage their website data. You'll learn about the specific process of setting up the Airtable to WordPress plugin, from generating a token for secure connectivity, to mapping your data with pretty granular control.
Episode here: https://wpbuilds.com/2024/04/25/370-airtable-meets-wordpress-uniting-airtables-power-with-wordpress
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 15th April 2024.
You can find the episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2024/04/23/this-week-in-wordpress-294
So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley.
It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. This week, it’s all about something called ‘component based web design’, but before that, a few words about what this show is about…
Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad!
Sad because there’s real power in what can now be achieved, and it’s an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript.
Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways!
The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject.
There are the show notes that you’ll find on the noscript.show website for this episode.
Today we are talking about… designing an effective homepage.
Today we're joined by Chris Badgett, who is a WordPresser with a rich background in e-learning and WordPress development. Starting in 2008 with a leadership blog, he transitioned to freelance work and eventually ran his own agency focused on learning management systems, memberships, and coaching.
Identifying a lack of integrated tools in the market, Chris founded LifterLMS, a learning management plugin for WordPress that blends e-commerce, gamification, and membership functions. Now, nine years after launch, LifterLMS is a testament to his dedication to providing WordPress solutions for educators and learners within the WordPress ecosystem.
In this episode, we talk about Chris's journey from humble blogging beginnings to crafting a comprehensive, integrated LMS platform that democratises online education for experts and novices alike.
Chris, a non-developer by trade, has leveraged the capabilities of full site editing to empower his customers to design online education experiences without the need to write any code.
We get into the milestones of LifterLMS, detailing the significance of their evolution towards full stack learning solutions. We talk about how the platform can be customised, and the recent launch of the SkyPilot theme, designed to significantly enhance the user experience for course creators and learners.
We also explore the shift from traditional themes to full site editing, how it's reshaping user expectations, and the role of templates and blocks in simplifying the creation of course content.
So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley.
It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. This week, it's all about something called 'component based web design', but before that, a few words about what this show is about...
Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad!
Sad because there’s real power in what can now be achieved, and it’s an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript.
Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways!
The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject.
There are the show notes that you’ll find on the noscript.show website for this episode.
Today we are talking about how do we start a website project?
Today we have a conversation with Jonathan Jernigan, the co-creator of the Pie Calendar plugin for WordPress. Jonathan has been working with WordPress for many years. For 5 years he worked with Oxygen, and within the last year has made the switch to full-time GenerateBlocks and GeneratePress as his tools of choice. As if that were not enough, he's also the co-founder of Pie Calendar, which is the reason that he's on the podcast today. This episode gets into the philosophy and strategy behind creating a WordPress plugin that champions a less-is-more approach. Jonathan, alongside his colleague Elijah Mills, took the decision that they wanted Pie Calendar be minimal and adapt to the needs of its users, be affordable, and concentrate upon a feature set which they could maintain. If you're interested in a lightweight calendar plugin for your WordPress website, this episode is for you.
Today we are talking about CSS container queries. These mark a serious advancement in what browsers will allow us to do, but we are asking what does that mean for us right now? CSS container queries off the potential for granular styling based on container size. We discuss the challenges overcome to make container queries possible, highlight real-world usage examples, and share our personal perspectives on their significance. We also hint at a potential shift in the show's focus for future episodes. Go listen...
Today we welcome Nenad Conic of Maksimer, to discuss some of the challenges and solutions in WooCommerce e-commerce projects. Maksimer, which has been at the forefront of WordPress and WooCommerce-based e-commerce solutions since its founding in 2009, has been creating large-scale and complex online stores. Nenad gets into the work required to operate a WooCommerce store with over 1.2 million products, and talks about how they developed a specialised platform for online medication management, utilising WooCommerce for subscription services within the constraints of healthcare regulations. The episode also gets into an ambitious endeavour where Maksimer used WooCommerce Bookings to craft a booking system for a camping site website, integrating a React application with Google Maps API to enhance the user experience. It's a really great implementation and shows how, with the right knowledge, Woo can be used for unconventional e-commerce scenarios. It's a fascinating discussion, showing what Woo is capable of if you've got the time, budget, expertise to hire a team like Maksimer. Good food for thought concerning the future of e-commerce in WordPress.
So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley. It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. This week, it's all about something called 'component based web design', but before that, a few words about what this show is about... Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad! Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways! The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject. This episode looks at 'component based web design', what it is, and do we even need it?
Today, I'm chatting with with Raitis Sevelis on several topics in the WordPress landscape. Sevelis has an extensive background in UI/UX design and product management for prominent WordPress tools like WPBakery and Visual Composer, and he shares his insights into the inner workings of the platform and the community. We discuss the founding principles and unique features of IndieStack, Raitis' latest venture, which bridges the gap between developer needs and client usability in managed WordPress hosting. IndieStack introduces the capability for developers to work on a site for free and transfer ownership to their clients while maintaining developer access, a novel concept that I find quite intriguing for some agency workflows. Raitis also takes us behind the scenes of WP Racoon, his side project, which serves as a forum for discussing plugins, themes, and the business of WordPress, away from the constraints of corporate affiliations. The role of communities, the use of Facebook for engaging with users, and the strategic benefits and downsides of such platforms are also discussed. We round off the episode getting into the need for core developers and the community to collaborate in refreshing WordPress's ecosystem through improved onboarding, user interface, and by fostering educational content to power the platform's next phase of growth.
So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley. It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. This week, it's all about something called 'Intrinsic design', but before that, a few words about what this show is about... Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad! Sad because there’s real power in what can now be achieved, and it’s an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript. Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways! The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject. These are the show notes that you’ll find on the noscript.show website for this episode. This episode looks at 'Intrinsic design', what it is, and why it's important for the future of the web.
Today we're having an interesting conversation with Jorge Casals, and we're talking about DataPocket. Jorge chats about how DataPocket serves as a conduit for synchronising data from various platforms to design tools, offering a better flow of information for e-commerce teams. The discussion gets into DataPocket's pricing model and its integration with Intercom for customer support, highlighting the roadmap to expand its reach to larger enterprises. Jorge talks about why he thinks DataPocket is revolutionising e-commerce by automating content creation and synchronisation, while also addressing the platform's utility for agencies and plans for future integrations. We also tackle the ethical implications of AI integration and the thought process behind DataPocket's approach to data storage and accessibility. As you'll hear in the episode, I was a little unsure of how it all worked, but I'm sure that you'll figure it all out from Jorge's explanations! If you've not heard of DataPocket before and are interested in how synchronisation of designs can alter the e-commerce landscape, this episode is for you.
So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley. It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad! Sad because there’s real power in what can now be achieved, and it’s an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript. Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways! The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject. These are the show notes that you’ll find on the noscript.show website for this episode: This episode looks at what modern CSS techniques can bring to make your designs easier to manage, and much more interesting.
So today we're chatting with Gen Herres about web accessibility. Gen is an experienced WordPress developer who has been in the field for over a decade. After making the typical mistakes in website development, Gen met Amber Hinds in 2019 and became interested in accessibility through her company, Equalize Digital. This led to a deep dive into the world of accessibility, and Gen began to incorporate it into her development processes. She discovered the lack of good checklists for accessibility and continues to explore this challenging and rewarding aspect of web development. Whether you're new to the world of accessibility or a seasoned professional seeking to enhance your knowledge, this episode provides a comprehensive overview of the critical role that accessibility plays in web development.
So we're back with another 'podcast hijack', in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I'm doing with David Waumsley. It's called "The No Script Show", and we're getting back to the basics which we feel we've lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we've not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS... and that made us sad! Sad because there's real power in what can now be achieved, and it's an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript. Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they're tied together in so many ways! The hope is that you'll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject.
The WP Builds Podcast episode #356 features an in-depth conversation with James Giroux, discussing the Team Experience Index survey by TeamWP. Key insights from the survey highlight areas for improvement in the WordPress community, emphasizing transparent leadership, communication, ownership, and continuous learning. Recommendations include fostering an inclusive culture and intentional recognition for team development. Have a listen to find out more...
So in episode 353 we said bye bye to David Waumsley. Well, now is the time to own up to the fact that David is not in fact going away! In my defence, David is moving away from the WP Builds podcast, as he's really no longer making much use of WordPress, but he's still in the website building profession. He's decided that he wants to make website without a framework, and therefore he's going to be working from with HTML and CSS and trying to follow along with the guidelines the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) lay out for us all to follow. With that in mind, no sooner had David stepped away from WP Builds, well, he was back in my inbox asking if I'd like to create an entirely new podcast with him about this 'new' (old?) approach of his to website building. Having loved every minute of the past seven years of content creation with David, I jumped at the chance, and so a new show was born, and we're calling it the 'No Script Show'. You can find it at noscript.show. So for the next six episodes which would have normally been myself and David, it's still going to be myself and David. Hopefully you'll get an understanding of what we're, and you never know, some of you might even subscribe to the show as well. After six weeks of this format, we'll go back to just WP Builds content, week after week. So here it is then... episode 1 of the No Script Show. I hope that you enjoy it.
On the podcast today, I have a conversation with Jakob Trost and Anne Bovelett, as we expore GREYD.SUITE, and its philosophy and commitment to website accessibility in the products they offer. Jakob tells us about GREYD's approach to website development, emphasising the company's dedication to providing a complete suite of tools for professional websites. The discussion revolves around GREYD's innovative "hub" for website management, which allows users to administer and manage multiple websites from a single interface, simplifying the process even when the websites are on different servers and WordPress installations. Anne joins in with her passionate advocacy for accessibility in web design. She shares her journey in making websites fully accessible, highlighting the prevalent misconceptions around accessibility and the ongoing work required to create inclusive digital experiences. Anne's vision of developing a plugin to guide users on accessibility levels and design alternatives is also discussed. This episode is a great testament to one company's journey towards better, accessible-ready, tools for website builders and developers. It's lovely to see a WordPress product which has gone 'back to the drawing board' to see if they can make this matter for them, and therefore you too!
It’s the last episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series… and also David's last as a regular on WP Builds. We’ve saved the most “unthinkable” for the end which is: “Is it time to quit WordPress?”. It isn’t for Nathan, but for David it (sort of) is. He'll still use WordPress daily as his own local static site generator and code organiser, but he disabled Gutenberg and has stopped using almost all 3rd party software. As he's not going with WordPress’ new direction, it makes sense to make way for those who are. More on that in 2024! So this episode is done with a tear in our eyes, but we don't just cry, we get into the subject of why it's time for David to move on from his decades long obsession with WordPress, and what he's going to be doing next. What happened with WordPress for David to feel like there's better ways of making sites in the future?
Today, we're joined by Rytis Lauris, the co-founder and CEO of Omnisend, a marketing automation platform for online businesses. We discuss the enduring effectiveness of email marketing, the importance of owning your own content, and how Omnisend integrates with WordPress and WooCommerce to provide value for online sellers. Rytis explains how email automation can drive revenue and improve customer engagement, and emphasises the need for permission-based communication and personalised messages. He also shares insights on the growing importance of SMS marketing and the role of AI technology in streamlining marketing processes. With their innovative approach to automation and targeted campaigns, Omnisend is paving the way for businesses to effectively communicate with their customers and boost their online sales.
On the podcast today we're straying into the world of AI. Not in the way that everybody else does, with an intelligent analysis of the use of AI and tools to make your life easier. No that's too difficult for us. We've decided to pollute your podcast listening experience today with an episode made (almost) entirely with AI tools. Honestly, I'd give up here if I were you, but if you fancy a laugh, please feel free to continue. Do not write in complaining about the "hour of your life that you're never going to get back". We know, we had to make this thing! We input some fairly boilerplate text prompts into a variety of AI tools (you can find out which in the recording) and read out what they told us to say. No edits, no modifications, it's exactly what the AI thought would make a good podcast. Somewhat alarmingly, they're way better than usual (they're not I hope, I just added that in to be self deprecating). It's early days for AI, and so it's somewhat expected that the output of the AI models was going to be generic, and a little over-the-top, but in some cases it's impressive; the text often stays on-message and adds a certain je ne sais quoi.
In today's episode, we're talking about serverless WordPress with our guest, Carl Alexander, founder and developer of Ymir. As you will hear, Carl is very clever, and I'm out-to-sea with the topic under discussion! Carl is passionate about the concept of serverless technology, and is fully embracing it as a way to simplify server management for WordPress users. With serverless technology, Carl believes that users can upload their WordPress sites without having to worry about managing servers, updates, or security concerns. He views serverless technology as a game-changer, allowing users to focus on their content without the hassle of server management. As always, if you enjoyed the conversation leave a comment, and share it all over the place!!!
It’s the 19th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series and today's (ambiguous) topic is... "Is 20 years too long in web tech?". Full of our usual British cheerfulness, we are celebrating WordPress’s 20th birthday year with a title implying its potential demise. This episode is not about predicting the future of WordPress. It’s because we have never had a chat dedicated to why some web tech flourishes (as WordPress certainly did), and some die. We cover the following: The last 30 years of the web (gosh, it's a real adult now). Is growth and demise in tech a matter of luck and unpredictable? The fundamental web languages, and how they lasted. HTML and CSS are safe, aren't they? But... frameworks and CMS's are vulnerable. There's a lot more in this episode as well, so check it out...
Today on the podcast we have Leonardo Losoviz. Leonardo is an experienced developer and the creator of the Gato GraphQL plugin for WordPress. We'll be exploring the power of Gato GraphQL, its features, and how it could change the way we use WordPress. Leonardo highlights the power of GraphQL, a technology for retrieving data from a server. It can be used in WordPress to fetch data from the server and render HTML in the editor for interactive content creation. GraphQL offers advantages over the REST API, providing flexible querying and manipulating of data, such as retrieving metadata for personalised emails or duplicating and modifying blog posts. He also explains how his plugin builds on top of this foundation to enable WordPress to make use of this powerful technology. To help users get started and unlock the full potential of Gato GraphQL, Leonardo has created a section called "recipes" within the plugin and on the website. These pre-coded GraphQL queries serve as a learning tool, explaining how GraphQL works and providing tips for more complex tasks like translating posts. The recipes gradually increase in complexity, allowing users to grasp the full capabilities of the plugin over time. So, whether you're a WordPress developer looking to enhance your website's capabilities or a content creator searching for more efficient ways to manage and distribute your content, this episode is for you. Get ready to tap into the power of Gato GraphQL and unlock a new world of possibilities within WordPress.
It’s the 18th episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series and our topic is "Who needs a Content Management System (CMS) anyway?" Have you noticed how you obsess about all the amazing things that you can do with your client websites? Imagine if they did this, or, you know what would double your revenue... you could do this. A few months after launch you realise that they're using none of the functionality that you painstakingly built! WordPress is a truly capable Content Management System (CMS), but do most of our clients really need it? Can they make use of all that's possible, or should we be pointing them towards other options, like static sites. We talk about our history with CMS's as well as when we think that WordPress is the 'best fit' for clients.
On the podcast today we have Jason Cross. He's an experienced tech executive with a diverse background in the industry. Currently serving as the SVP of product at Bluehost / Newfold Digital, and he's been there for over a year and a half. He is responsible for overseeing their WordPress, commerce, and proprietary products across multiple global brands. Before joining Bluehost / Newfold Digital. The basic premise is this... WordPress website hosts experience quite a lot of customer churn, and so Bluehost are seeking to reduce this by delivering websites as efficiently as possible, aiming to keep users satisfied with their WordPress experience from the moment they first log in to their account. This endeavour is called WonderSuite, and later in the episode we unravel the wonders of WonderSuite (did you see what I did there!), a series of unique experiences curated to cater to the needs of agencies, professionals, and small business owners, irrespective of their WordPress familiarity.
It’s the 17th episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series and our topic is “Don’t make websites for friends and family”. Do I even need to explain this episode?!?! If, like David and I, you stumbled into working on the web, then it's likely that friends and relations played some part in getting your career off the ground. Back-in-the-day there were no 'pros' and clients were just after someone who had a pulse and knew how to turn a computer on to build their site. This was nice. Now, the industry is highly skilled and professional, so is there any space for someone to work for their friends when there's more 'legitimate' places to find work? We discuss this and more on the podcast today.
Today we're joined by Dan Knauss, a technical content generalist at SolidWP (formerly iThemes). The episode focuses on the importance of hardening WordPress websites for enhanced security. Dan discusses their approach to security, which includes targeted security measures rather than trying to cover every potential vulnerability. They emphasise the need for timely updates and advocate for working with a reliable host that provides hardware and software firewalls. Dan also addresses the limitations of traditional security plugins, referring to WordPress malware scanners as "fundamentally flawed" and proposing an external line of security through application firewalls. The conversation highlights the upcoming rebranding of iThemes to SolidWP and touches on their premium security product, Solid Security, which prioritises tried and tested features over added "bolt-ons".
This is the 16th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series and I think we have come up with our catchiest title ever... “Is browser interoperability a threat to page building?" - truly inspirational!
Remember the good old days when no two browsers renders anything in the same way? You don't? You're lucky!
It used to be the case that all of the browsers went their own way. The result was a spaghetti of code, with little variations for each of the browsers.
This was a waste of our time, but it also held back the innovation with HTML and particularly CSS, for a decade or more.
Thankfully though, that's behind us, and the browser vendors seems to be speaking the same language. This means that in the future the browsers will do so much more, with far less complexity.
How much of a threat are browsers to Page Builders? Find out today on the podcast…
This is third of four podcast episodes related to WordPress security. It's the third of our four-part security mini series. Prior to that, the other episodes featured Calvin Alkan as well as Akshat Choudhary. This is Thomas from, we watch your website giving his impression of the state of WordPress security. I did the spiel before, but I'm going to do it again in order to not put anybody's noses out of joint and to make it as fair as possible. I recorded four episodes with Calvin, Akshat, Thomas, and in a future episode, Dan Knauss from SolidWP. They all have that chance to explain the malware madness as we'll get into a little bit later. How WordPress security plugins do or don't, depending on your point of view, protect your WordPress website. Thomas is giving his opinion today and we go into loads of ground. We talk about such subjects as security plugin, and cleanup processes, previous attacks, challenges, and vulnerabilities, security features, Thomas' expertise, protecting your WordPress by blocking IPs, the motivations of hackers, and so much more.
This in the 15th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series. Today we are asking... is the WordPress community overrated? What have we done? This could be the end of this podcast! Let’s hope nobody thinks we are trying to speak for the community, or that we even have a clue what the community truly is! We explore the diverse perspectives surrounding the WordPress community. From debates on diversity and inclusion to the avoidance of political discussions, we navigate the complexities and challenges faced by this ever-growing community. We also touch on the recent issues surrounding the handling of diversity at the European WordCamp, causing tensions to rise among community members. We begin by examining the difficulties in defining and understanding the WordPress community, recognising its immense user base in America and the UK. We share our personal experiences and observations, shedding light on the ebb and flow of community engagement, facing issues of churn, and questioning whether WordPress will maintain its relevance in the future. We also discuss the impact of online confrontations and the perception of fragmentation within the community, analysing the role of media coverage in amplifying conflicts.
This is second of four podcast episodes related to WordPress security. For the first time ever (well second time I suppose!) I feel like I need to add some context to the show notes so that you understand the context of what I'm doing here. A little while ago there was some news in the WordPress space about the merits of using plugins for securing your WordPress website. Researchers (see the previous episode for more on this) had discovered ways in which the effectiveness of the plugins might be compromised. There were several posts on social media which amplified the issue, making it harder to gain an understanding of what happened, and when. I decided to reach out to a number of people to get 'their side of the story'. Today you're going to hear from Akshat Choudhary from Blogvault and Malcare putting his case for why WordPress firewalls and scanners are useful.
It is the 14th episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series. The idea for today's topic came from our last episode in which we were talking about the pros and cons of no code builders. Here we’re asking "Are web design clients only interested in what they can see?", but it could have been "Are web designers responsible for the growth in DIY sites?". We explore the evolving landscape of web design and the growing trend of clients taking a more active role in designing their own websites. We discuss the challenges of balancing client expectations, user experience, performance, and accessibility. We also touch on the rise of page builders and DIY website building, examining the potential consequences and legal implications for those who lack the necessary knowledge and skills in areas such as accessibility. On a side note, we're looking for sponsors for the upcoming Page Builder Summit in September, so if you're interested, be sure to reach out. Also, please note that there will be a week off next week, but rest assured, we'll be back with episode two of our security mini series then. As always, we invite you to subscribe to the WP Builds podcast and leave your comments on our website.
his is first of four podcast episodes related to WordPress security.
For the first time ever, I feel like I need to add some context to the show notes so that you understand the context of what I'm doing here.
A little while ago there was some news in the WordPress space about the merits of using plugins for securing your WordPress website. Researchers (Calvin being one of them) had discovered ways in which the effectiveness of the plugins might be compromised. I'll leave the audio (and transcript) of the podcast to explain the technicalities here, but there were several posts on social media which amplified the issue, making it harder to gain an understanding of what happened, and when.
I decided to reach out to a number of people to get 'their side of the story'.
Also a first for this podcast, I set some ground rules for the interviews to take place:
Each participant (there are four in total, one per episode) was told who the other guests were
Each participant was told that their episode would not be published until all four recordings had taken place
Each participant was told that their episode would be published in a random order
What you're listening to today is the first of that random publishing schedule. The other three episodes will come out in the following weeks.
This was done to ensure that the guests did not have. a chance to listen to the other participants episode, and therefore had. a chance to 'better prepare'.
With hindsight, which was likely overkill as all the guests were very thoughtful and polite. They do in some cases mention rival products and describe areas where they think that errors were made in code and communication. That being said, there was no general sense of mud slinging that I detected.
The guests are (in random order):
Calvin Alkan - Snicco
Akshat Choudhary - Malcare
Dan Knauss - iThemes (now SolidWP)
Thomas J Raef - We Watch Your Website
I'm going to keep my commentary here to a minimum to avoid getting embroiled in the debate, but there's some additional information about what we cover in the show notes of the post.
So you've been building websites for a while now and you've got really good at it. You don't really touch the code, but that's okay, because the tool that you're using promised that you would never have to. Erm... how's that working out in reality? I'm guessing that if this question resonates with you, you'll be interested in the podcast today. Is it possible to have tools which really allow you to create good, working websites with none, zero, nada, ziltch, no code at all? We talk about whether true no code is possible, if it's something to be desired and the reliance you develop for a specific tool. Oh, and of course there's AI coming for your job as well! If you're creating WordPress websites with the assistance of tools, this podcast is for you.
On the podcast today we have Roman Axelrod, a web developer from Israel. Roman joins us to share his experience running a web development agency, and his journey into the world of WordPress. He discusses the challenges his agency faced when working with third-party freelancers who created inconsistent designs; the frustrations he felt and what he did about it. To tackle this issue, Roman and his team developed a dev tool that allows them to share style guidelines with freelancers and ensure consistency in design elements. The tool includes features for testing and ensuring accurate designs. We talk about what this tool can do, as well as the fact that Roman is open to having discussions with other like-minded people about the direction the tool might take. It's an interesting chat and you can leave a comment on the post as well as finding the links mentioned in the show.
Welcome to the 12th episode of our 'Thinking the Unthinkable' series. Today we shall be squirming in our seats as we talk about whether 'Affiliate marketing is disingenuous'. Affiliate marketing has never been our thing, but with making content there has to be some way to pay for the time. Certainly we have earned some commissions from it via our individual content. I think it fair to say we have struggled with it and here we are questioning whether it is a necessary or unnecessary evil. Is it a useful way for WordPress product owners to make some additional income? Perhaps you think that it's a sleazy way for marketers to hype products which they don't believe in? Maybe it's both, or neither! Have a listen to the podcast, and then leave is a comment.
On the podcast today we have Vova Feldman, the founder of Freemius. Vova is an entrepreneur with a passion for software development. He was introduced to WordPress by accident. While working as a software developer in the Israeli intelligence and doing startups on the side, Vova created a SaaS product as a hobby. People started requesting a WordPress plugin for his product, which sparked his curiosity about the platform. Vova delved into WordPress and created his first plugin, realising the potential of turning his side project into a WooCommerce solution. This led to building a platform to help developers easily commercialise their own passion projects - Freemius, a platform that simplifies the process of bringing products to market. The conversation is varied, covering two quite different subjects, podcasting (Vova's new podcast) and Freemius. If you're interested in selling your WordPress product, this podcast is worth a listen.
It is the 11th episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series, and today's thought provoking title is “No one cares what your website looks like!”. There’s a number of articles with this title and similar sentiment expressed by many UX designers and SEO’s. With limited ways to judge the abilities of a web agency, many clients are likely to approach websites as if they were a piece of work in an art gallery. This can see them getting ripped off. It is hard for us not to do the same. We know first impressions matter, and we are always searching for visual inspiration too. We get into how UX, SEO, branding, call to actions (and more) can influence the route that you might take when creating a website. Check out the episode...
On the podcast today we have a lovely conversation with Derek Ashauer. He's been working with WordPress for many years, and has gone through a few changes during that time. I suspect that many of you will really identify with this podcast. The idea that you're a web developer, plugin / theme / block author, content creator etc. might suit you for a while, but perhaps you've had itchy feet from time to time. Derek certainly has! He started out building websites in decades ago, but for a variety of reasons this did not seem to be 'the thing' that he wanted to do year after year. And so, in 2013 he decided to turn his attention into plugin development. Success (whatever that means) always seemed to be a little further into the future. Although his Sunshine Photocart plugin was doing fine, it was not the end of the road. You'll hear Derek explain that he's not that comfortable with marketing, having a more self deprecating demeanour (he fits right in here). So this podcast is all about listening to a nice person talking about how to transition from being an agency, dealing with clients, to being a product owner. Just lovely!
This is the 10th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series and today's thoroughly unsavoury thought is “Why pay full price when we have GPL clubs?”. I think to put things in perspective we need a bit of history. We tend to think of GPL clubs as a bit shady, but you could also argue that they serve as an essential consumer rights movement within WordPress. Let's start in the year 0. In the beginning was the Word. A few millennia later in the year 2003 WordPress comes along. It would not exist without the freedoms of the General Public Licence as it was a folk of b2/cafelog. It's build on the GPL and this allows for free use of code which sits on top of WordPress. But is this fair to the developers? Is it fair your clients? Are we all going to end up with malware infected plugins and themes which will wreak havoc on our site, or should we just talk a breath, calm down, and realise that this is all just fine? Find out what we think on the podcast today.
On the podcast we have Christiaan Pieterse from Maxi Blocks. If you've ever dug into WordPress block packs / suites then it's quite likely that what you're going to hear about Maxi Blocks today will be quite familiar, except one important thing - the pricing model. More on that in a minute. Maxi Blocks has all the blocks that you typical website needs. I could list them all here, but just click the link above and you'll find them. There's containers, headings, images, maps, groups, icons, sliders, all-the-things so to speak. The thing that's different here is that way that they're pitching the product. Maxi Blocks is free. There is no feature that is locked away. You have access to every block, every setting inside those blocks, no functionality is hidden behind a pro option. So, you're thinking, well this product won't last long. They'll go through their cash, give away everything and run out of road. Not so fast! They do have a pro version, but you're going to be paying only for pre-built designs and patterns. If you're curious about blocks, take a listen to the podcast, check out the Maxi Blocks site, and tell us what you think of the product in the comments.
This is the 9th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series and today's unpalatable thought is… WordPress is too expensive? We can dismiss this as insane ramblings straightway? It’s free! But, it can be expensive to do anything out of the ordinary, although Site Editing is changing that! Is WordPress a trap for the naive DIYer? Cheap start, but a longer term hidden costs in hosting and maintenance? Or is it still possible to build something decent but at a low cost? What about the freedoms that the GPL provides, and (dare I say it?) the websites that sell premium plugins for knock down prices? It's an interesting chat and we hope that you enjoy it!
Today on the podcast we have Arnas Donauskas, who is a Product Owner at Hostinger. He's on the show to talk about something that I'm sure that we've all felt before… that feeling of not being sure that WordPress is the project that it once was, that the future is not what you'd like, and how you can move on and work on the web with something else. This is a tough subject for a podcast called WP Builds! The name implies that we're here come what may! I guess that the title is a little bit of clickbait, and perhaps a better title would be more like 'how do you get your WordPress mojo back?' WordPress site building and growth can be challenging, and quite often people lose their motivation to continue, and this is what we address… getting back your inspiration and desire to use WordPress and be a part of the community that surrounds it. Having said all of that, we cover a lot of ground about this topic and a whole bunch of other topics too.
On this 8th episode of "Thinking the Unthinkable" we are asking “is ‘open source’ a liability? This was prompted by a 2021 incident. A zero-day attack called Log4Shell that affected major players like Microsoft and Cloudflare. It's a chat about risk assessment really. Lots of levels with WordPress’ LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL). It seems quite remarkable that WordPress has worked so well for 20 years. So how do we 'sell' free, open source solutions to our clients, when most of them are from a world in which you need to pay for all-the-things?
On the podcast today we have James Giroux and he's here to talk about a new project that he's set up called TeamWP. It's all about workplace culture, team dynamics and leadership in WordPress companies. We open up the conversation with a lengthy chat about the rich history that James has in the WordPress space. He's worked for lots of different companies in a multitude of different roles, some big, some small. He's had mixed experiences in these companies, feeling empowered and enabled in many roles, but also working in dysfunctional workplaces where he feels that his talents were not exploited to their fullest potential. Normally, the podcast guest's background would not be all that significant, but given the nature of the conversation today, it truly is. You see, the itch that James is trying to scratch with TeamWP is trying to figure out what a 'good' WordPress workplace looks like; what represents a 'good' company. Now James is not suggesting that he's got the answers to all these questions just yet. It's a work in progress, but TeamWP is on a mission to find out what all this means.
It's the 7th in our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series where we attempt to rationalise controversial views on WordPress and web design? Today’s topic is… Designing in the browser is for amateurs. David thought this topic was about whether to use design software rather than jump in with a page builder or start amending a template. Nathan thought it was about how design tools are increasingly online and work in the browser leaving us not having to install software for our computer operating systems. We will cover both because more recently graphical tools that work in the browser are also capable of spitting out HTML code too. Please feel free to leave us a comment at the bottom of the post!
On the podcast today we have Fränk Klein, and he's here to discuss the important topic of making a career from using WordPress. Like any other career, in technology, there's really no replacement for knowledge. The more you know, the more likely you are to adapt to situations that arise. Some of those might be repetitive, but there's also the curve balls that life throws at you, and your knowledge can empower you when strange things happen. Fränk is all about acquiring new skills. Learning new things so that you can make yourself indispensable to the organisation that you work for. Fränk's premise is pretty simple… being better educated will give you a chance to earn more. We talk about how Fränk became a WordPress developer. What his framework is for moving through the software industry, what his current job market is like in the wider WordPress ecosystem. Essentially, the message from this podcast boils down to staying curious and keep learning as a priority.
Welcome to the 6th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series where we attempt to rationalise controversial views on WordPress and web design. Today’s topic is, "If you use more than 10 plugins on a site, you are a cad and a scoundrel!" This is WP Builds humour for a chat about plugin strategy! We are sure most listeners will know plugins are only a method to deliver additional functionality to WordPress. They can be as complex as WooCommerce or as simple as the Hello Dolly plugin. As silly as it is to count the numbers, most of us are fascinated by what others use and are always reviewing the situation. So is there a sweet spot in the number of plugins you should use, and do you try to reduce plugin usage where possible? Find out what we think on the podcast...
Accessibility is a topic which is getting much more attention these days, and rightly so. It's important for websites because it ensures that everyone, including people with disabilities and impairments in areas such as sight, hearing, motor difficulties, or cognitive limitations, can effectively use and engage with the website content. By making your WordPress websites more accessible, you're creating a more inclusive and welcoming online experience for all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. But how might you do that, and what are you looking for to improve the accessibility of the site that you're working on now? Nic Steenhout is an expert in this area and he's here to go through some things that need your attention right now.
Welcome to the 5th episode of our "Thinking the Unthinkable" series, where we attempt to rationalise controversial views on WordPress and web design. Today’s topic is… Website Clients are Impossible! This could have been called "Web Designers are Impossible", as it’s about the sometimes tense relationship between those who commission websites and those who build them. Do we correctly set the expectations for our clients, or are we opening ourselves up to criticism because they're not at all clear on how our process works? Are we working with "the client always knows best" model, and does this really give them what they need? Should we rather explain to them we're the expert and they should jolly well listen every time we speak? It's a fun conversation and no doubt there's going to be a lot of food for thought!
Today, it's all about WordPress security and what you can do with the WP Vulnerability API / project. In the podcast you're going to meet the wonderful Javier, and I thought that I'd let him take over the show notes, as he wrote such wonderful notes prior to our chat. So… over to Javier… Hello, I'm Javier, and I'm around the Internet since 1994. In 1997, I created my first website, and in 2005, I created my first WordPress (with WordPress 1.5). Today we are talking about WPVulnerability.com, a project focused on democratizing WordPress security information. This project is a 100% open and free API, for access by any WordPress user, with the sole purpose of improving the security of a site, thanks to this information. Although is an API, with some colleagues, we created the WPVulnerability plugin, that checks your site looking for vulnerabilities and showing them in the Site Health section. Find out more by checking out the podcast.
This seems a little odd, 'Do we even need WordPress', given that we're a WordPress podcast. But, there's actually quite a lot to be said here. Both David and I have been using WordPress for years (David, quite a bit longer), and perhaps it's time to think about whether WordPress is always the right choice for our website building projects. If the site is a simple brochure site that's really never going to get updates, is WordPress really the right option? After all, you'll be needing to maintain the website, patch for security, update themes and plugins, when all that you really needed were a few lines of HTML, CSS as perhaps some JavaScript. David's been exploring taking his sites more in the 'static' direction lately, and whilst you can do this with WordPress and some plugins, David's finding the joys of writing his own HTML and getting back into what the w3c have to say. It's a fun chat and something that you might not have looked at closely, so go and have a listen and leave us a comment.
Deal Alert: Get 10% off MasterWP Workshops using the coupon code 'wpbuilds10' - it's valid until 15th April 2023. On the podcast today, we have Rob Howard. No, not the film director, but the one from MasterWP. If you've not heard of MasterWP before, then you're missing out as they're on a mission to create a heap of WordPress related content. They've got workshops, tutorials, a fast-growing blog and a podcast! The podcast today is in (more or less) two halves. First up, we chat about the community that Rob and his team are trying to build up in the WordPress space. Then we talk about the MasterWP workshops, and how they're creating workshops and courses on a very regular basis. It's an interesting chat with Rob, and I hope you enjoy it!
So, there's no denying that WordPress Page Builders have taken the community by storm over the last decade. Whether you use them or not, they're popular, and dare I say it, used on more WordPress sites than site not using a Page Builder? But, as the title of this episode says, are they the scourge of the internet? We chat about this topic from a whole variety of different angles. Do they typically add bloat to the HTML that we output? Do they offer clients a poor, and inconsistent, experience? Are they difficult to scale up for larger projects? Do they keep up with the technologies that modern browsers are introducing? Do they devalue our profession? There's a lot there, right? And there's a lot more in the podcast to get your teeth into. Check it out.
Some of us love working with CSS. It's fun, pretty easy to learn, and gets the job done. Others… not so much. It's boring, hard to master, and you end up doing things incorrectly all the time! Over the years, there's been many attempts to make CSS easier to write and work with… literally dozens. Today on the show we have Kevin Geary, the founder of Automatic CSS (ACSS), which is a utility framework for WordPress page builders. Its aim is to make modern CSS available for all to use, and to implement this inside of the tools that you're already using - Page Builders, and to grow the number of page builders which they support. Currently, they cover Oxygen and Bricks, but hope to grow to cover Gutenberg, Zion Builder and Cwicly. The idea is that they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, so that much of the regular work that you might have to create right at the start of a project is taken care of. We get into what the project can do and how it can save you time. What can it control and how 'heavy' it is, or isn't?
We asked ChatGPT the question "could artificial intelligence (A.I.) kill the web design industry?". This is what we got back... "It is unlikely that artificial intelligence (A.I.) will completely kill the web design industry. While A.I. and automation tools may be able to handle certain aspects of web design, it is unlikely that they will be able to fully replace the creativity and problem-solving skills of human web designers. Web design involves more than just technical skills; it also requires an understanding of user experience, branding, and visual design principles. These are areas where A.I. may not be able to fully replace human designers." Did you read all of the words like 'unlikely', fully replace' in that sentence? We're doomed! Seriously though, there are going to be some pretty radical shifts in how we build websites in the years to come and some of that shifting will be to do with A.I. and the abilities it brings to bear. Find out what we think in the podcast this week.
So this is all about AI, so buckle up as it's all the hotness! It's not the usual AI hotness though, because this podcast is not about ChatGPT and how it'll likely break the world. No, this is about how you can use AI to create works of art for your WordPress website, or for any reason, in fact. I interviewed Josh Dailey and Aaron Edwards, who have a service called Imajinn. It's an AI for creating images and there's a WordPress plugin which allows you to do all the magic in the WordPress admin, which is nice. We spend some time at the start getting to know Josh and Aaron and their background in the WordPress space, which, as you'll hear, is really rather extensive. We then move onto the fascinating subject of how AI art is actually created. I've got to say that I'm pretty blown away with how it all works. It's basically guessing pixel-by-pixel what should come next. It all starts with a prompt, and then the AI tries to work out what the next layer of pixels should be, and it keeps spreading out like this until it decides that it's done enough. Think ripples on a pond. Hey presto, instant (almost) artwork! Is this scary or just the best thing ever? Listen to the podcast and leave a comment to tell us your thoughts.
Welcome to the very first episode in our sparkling new series that we are calling "Thinking the Unthinkable", or TUTT for short, which I quite like! Here we challenge ourselves to answer (or at least rationalise) provocative statements or critical opinions of WordPress and our glorious website building profession. We are gently easing ourselves in with today’s topic, which is… "Website builders should be certified" (like - what proper professionals are)! By "certified" we mean officially recognised as possessing certain qualifications or meeting certain standards. Not legally declared insane and committed to a psychiatric institution. What might this look like? What should be included? Do we even need anything like this? Is there anything in WordPress trying to tackle this? Listen to the podcast and tell us what you think.
On the podcast today we have Zach Swinehart in the second of an, unexpectedly, two-part episode. We talked for so long that I decided it was best as two episodes instead of a really long single episode. You really need to listen to episode 310 of the podcast before this one, so go do that now if you have not already! We start off today where we left off last time, with my addiction to email and whether I could conquer that, then moving on to talk about Zach's framework for Deep Work which is step by step guide to helping you to get your concentration back in a world that's constantly trying to steal your attention. Zach was kind enough to write his own show notes for this episode and so rather than reinvent the wheel, you'll find them by heading to the podcast page.
Welcome to the last episode (sigh) in our Business Bootcamp series. Over the last year, we have been attempting to question everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design businesses. We looked at the entire process, from meeting our first client to helping them to support their site. We’ve tried to contrast approaches by looking at the traditional project (waterfall) where we are hired to build the finished (website) "product", and an agile approach, where we will try to use online SEO and UX data gathered, to iteratively improve the site as an ongoing collaboration with the client. Here we have set ourselves a few questions in an attempt to sum up what we have learned over this series and, more generally, our time in the website building industry. It's been a fun ride!
On the podcast today we have Zach Swinehart in the first of an (unexpectedly) two-part episode. We talked for so long that I decided it was best as two episodes instead of a really long single episode. "Productivity hacks" feel a bit like snake oil to me at this point. We've all heard a million of them and they never seem to work. Today's episode should affect your productivity. It's not a "weird productivity tip that your doctor does not want you to know about". Instead, it's a fundamental approach that we can take to our work as designers and developers to prioritise high-quality focus on the right stuff. Zach is going to go deep on the concept of "strategic deep work" and how you can leverage it to really get meaningful results in your freelancing business. Whether you're a soloist freelancer or you're trying to scale your agency, you'll get something out of this episode.
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...
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.
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!
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites, and running a web design business from start to finish. We are on Season 4 which is a short season looking at training clients. Today we are talking about website documentation and support. When we hand over a website, are we obliged to support it into the future, or can we just hand it over and be done with it? If we are going to support it, is there some standard of documentation we need to provide? Paper based, videos, in-person. I suspect that we've all got different ways of handling this, so check out the podcast to see what we do. BONUS, it's a short episode and you'll be done with it in no time!
If you've used WordPress for any length of time and use plugins, it's highly likely that you've seen notifications in the backend which you did not expect. Perhaps they were ads, or upsells for things which are already installed. WordPress notifications serve a purpose. They are there for a very good reason, to notify you of things that you ought to be aware of. You just published a post. Something needs updating. That kind of thing. But not all the notifications that we see are the kind that you might call 'essential' or 'useful'. This goes back to the fact that the WordPress notifications system was not really designed to be used in the variety of ways that ingenious developers have been able to use them. It's a bit like cookies. They we created to maintain state on a website, and then developers figured out a whole raft of other uses for them, some of them somewhat undesirable. The system was created and then it was warped and reused in alternative ways. So it is with WordPress notifications. Brian Coords is on the podcast today to talk through his thoughts on the WordPress notifications systems and how it might be improved so stop its true purpose being misused.
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites, and running a web design business from start to finish. We are taking contrasting approaches to getting our new businesses running and our first client’s site built. Today we're talking about what you, or don't do when handing over the site in terms of training. Do you prepare reams and reams of documents which carefully outline the ways to achieve all-the-things, and hand it to them in a big binder? Do you make videos for the client so that they can see what they need to do? Perhaps you react after the fact and wait until the client comes to you with specific queries, which you answer one at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, you don't do much at all and hope that the client figures it all out for themselves and leaves you alone to get on with the next website? Whatever it is, we'd love for you to listen to the podcast and then leave us a comment about how your process differs or aligns with ours.
On the podcast today we have WPCodeBox plugin developer Ovidiu Maghetiu, and he's here to explain how it works and what it can do, and it can do... a lot! WPCodeBox is turning out to be one of those plugins that you know that you're going to use for years to come. What I really like about this plugin is that it's a conduit for your imagination. Many plugins offer you a pathway for achieving a particular task. You use it to achieve one or two things. WPCodeBox is designed to be an empty container which you fill up with your (or other peoples) ideas. It's all about snippets at its heart. You can add snippets for PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SaaS to your website and in many cases reduce the plugin footprint as a result. Check out the podcast to find out more...
So the moment has arrived. You've busted a jut and got the website finished. It's 100% ready to roll. Now what? Well, you've got to launch it and let the world see the great work that you've done! So what's involved in that? What do you typically need to do to make that happen? This is the subject that we explore on the podcast today and it's one where David and Nathan have different approaches. David is going agile and is likely to ship it as soon as the first page is ready, whereas Nathan is waiting until the entire site is completed. What steps do you need to follow on our launch checklist, and what things can go wrong?
On the podcast today we have Raitis Sevelis from Visual Composer, and he's here today to talk about the how you should use your WordPress page builder with pride and explain to your clients the many benefits that it brings to your workflow. There was a time when page builders first came around that they were somewhat spurned in the community. Not by all, and not for long. They were doing things in a new way, and sometimes new hurts. Gone were many of the technical barriers to creating sites. No more need to be wrangling template files and inserting shortcodes here there and everywhere. Page builders allowed a whole new audience to come to WordPress and build site for themselves as well as for their clients. Raitis thinks that sometimes we hide our page builder skills a little; assume that clients will think that less of us for using them. He has the opinion that we ought to be talking about how we use them more with our clients, and explaining how their use us making websites faster, cheaper and more easy for non-technical users to maintain and amend.
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. And today we are discussing 'Legal stuff'. So this is about what we know (which is coming from our perspective, not that of a lawyer) about what responsibilities we have as the builders of WordPress websites for clients. Some of the decisions made when building a site potentially have legal consequences. GDPR, accessibility and those connected to rights and copyright. Lots of advice can be found in the WordPress Community, but like elsewhere, much could be profit motivated. So, having a sensible conversation about expectations and responsibilities seems the obvious thing to do?
So on the podcast today we have Amber Hinds and she's here to use her expertise to explain how and why WordPress websites need to be accessible. It's a really important topic at the moment. There seems to be a groundswell of understanding that the web really does need to be made available to all, and that means thinking about all the people who might be visiting your site. So that's people who are using screen readers, people consuming videos who are hard of hearing, and so much more. We talk about what accessibility is and what comes under its purview. Is it something that you need to do under law or is it something that you can leave until later? There's a lot more to this than meets to eye, and it's well worth a listen if you're new to all this, or if you've already started your accessibility journey.
There's a WordPress plugin solution for almost every possible scenario. Booking - done. Commerce - done. Learning management - done. Done, done and done. In fact in many cases, there's many different plugins available with slightly differing features! We're spoilt for choice frankly. By are there times when it's better for you or your client to think outside of WordPress plugins and consider a SaaS solution? That's the topic of the conversation to and we dig into situations where we're preferred non-WordPress options because it's just a better fit for the specific project / client. We chat about what we're using and when we think it's best to just confess that WordPress is not always what we want to use and that there are many superb solutions out there. We hope that you enjoy the podcast.
This episode is like no other we've ever put out, because it's not really about WordPress, more about a lifestyle that working with WordPress might allow you to have. Alex is on the podcast today to talk about the decisions that he's made to be a digital nomad. Now, when I think about the phrase digital nomad, it conjures up images of people who are constantly on the move. Moving from place to place, never settling anywhere. This is not quite how Alex has things set up. Alex, his wife, his two kids, his two cats and his dog all life in a camper. In the UK we call them camper vans, and I've heard them called RVs as well I think. Anyway, think of a small house on wheels. When Alex and I started talking about what we might talk about on the podcast, this topic was suggested and I jumped on it. So there's not really any plugins or themes mentioned, it's just about the way that Alex and his family live, and I love this kind of thing.
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. We are on the third episode of Season 3 where we are looking at The Technical Build. And today we are discussing 'Performance testing during the build'. Here we are primarily thinking about front and back end technical performance, but we will also touch on things related to the design technical issues too. So what things do we do to test performance and what tools have we come across to help with this vital job. Find out by listening to the podcast.
So I'm going to keep this brief, as this podcast was a little bit of a scoop, which we don't often get! Last week it was announced that Elementor (the page builder) had bought Strattic (the headless hosting company). I thought that this was an interesting purchase and I wanted to know more. Very quickly I was able to get hold of the co-founder of Strattic, Miriam Schwab, and Amitai Gat, the product organisation lead at Elementor. This episode is all about this recent news. How did it come about? What's in it for both parties? What happens next? It would be good to point out that the day after this episode was recorded, the news of Elementor laying off some employees broke, but as this had not yet happened, this is not covered. Go check out the podcast...
The web designer’s tech stack. We last talked about the website building platform we might use for this project. Here we are widening this and look at the basic essential hardware and software we might need to start our business. So it's all the 'stuff' that you have around you, both physical objects like a computer and a phone, as well as the software that you might be using. When you get into it, it's pretty amazing just how much stuff there is that you 'need'. Way more than I thought. It's also interesting what you don't need; either because it's not essential, or because it got replaced over time with something else. It's a fun episode, and if any of the things that we discuss resonate with you, please leave a comment on the site...
DEAL ALERT - there's a deal mentioned in the podcast - do NOT miss out on this one, as it's truly fabulous, not only in what you get, but in the way that you get it! It's running until 23rd June 2022. So this plugin (If-So) is such a powerhouse, I don't even know where to start. It's a WordPress plugin designed to allow you to create content on your site which will display based upon a whole heap of conditions. Wait... what does that even mean? I'm glad that you asked. Let's say that it's Christmas, and you want to show something additional during the run up to the holidays, you can do that with a date condition. What about an offer only available to Android users? That's a device condition. A part of the site only visible to people who came from a specific website? That's a referral condition. You set a condition and then you specify what ought to happen. Simple in principle, enormously powerful in reality. Josef Carmeli is on the podcast today to talk about what the plugin can do, how it can transform your website and how it's perhaps the coolest thing that you've not yet tried.
So, we've made it to series three of the WordPress Business Bootcamp and this is perhaps a little more where the rubber meets the road. Now we're going to be thinking about the tools that we use to build a website and keep it going for the client. We're split the 'tools' topic up into two episodes. This weeks it's all about WordPress and next week it's all the other things that you need which are not related to WordPress. What WordPress tools do we need then, and does the way that we build our sites need to have anything to do with our clients, or is it just for our (the website builder) convenience. Listen to this episode to see what we've ended up with as our basic stack, and if you think that we've missed anything, be sure to let us know in the comments.
So you've tried Gutenberg, and you might like to or you might not! But one thing that you cannot really argue about is that it's got some room for improvement. During the last few release cycles there's been more and more talk about block patterns and how they're going to make WordPress website building more straightforward. Block patterns are a collection of blocks that have been built and saved away for future use. So think about a typical use case, you have a hero section of your website that you might use over and over again. You build it one time, adding in a variety of blocks, and once you're happy, you save it and then later you can add it into any other part of your website with the click of a button. But here's the problem. The block editor is still a little but, how shall we say it... fun to use. It's got some quirks and you might not find it as easy as you'd wish to get pixel perfect patterns. Step in Extendify. They have a suite of pre-made block patterns which you can use. It's really all about making life simple. They're all built on top of WordPress Core blocks so there's no lock in and you can use them to learn how to build your own block patterns.
Another episode of the WordPress Business Bootcamp where we try to go right back to the start and unpick the process of building sites for clients. Today we're on to the tricky subject of 'Design Aesthetics'! Aesthetics affect a brand's credibility and perception. The look and feel is probably the thing that first hit us first and is most important to our clients. But the problem is that aesthetics are subjective, there is no agreed way to deliver such things and we have to find some way to avoid design by committee (the client seeking outside parties) or the loudest voice winning without reference to the overall goals. So how we might do this is the subject of the podcast today. Remember that there's a dozen other episodes in this series prior to this, but we'd love to get your thoughts on this one... tell us where you get your inspiration and how you handle this with your clients.
So there's loads of WordPress tools out there that will help you create your WordPress websites. Chances are that you've tried out a few and have some favourite which you use most of the time. New tools are coming out all of the time and this episode is about one of those new tools... Builderius. I can already here you starting to sigh. You're thinking that there's no need for another tool, there's already too many and they all do pretty much the same thing. Well Volodymyr Denchyk is here to try to explain why Builderius is different. And, well, he's got a point. This is not a Page Builder like you might have used before. It's more... what's the word... technical. It needs more from you, the website builder, and it return it promises that it'll give you almost unlimited possibilities back. It's it point, click, drag and save? No. Does that mean that it's not worth looking at? Also, no. I think that it's got a place, especially if you want to make everything exactly as you want it. So, a technical episode, but well worth a listen. I just love it when new things like this come along.
So today we're talking about UI and UX, user interface and user experience, and it's a really huge topic. We start off by what these crucial concepts are and how they differ and then we get into the weeds of how they can be broken down into more manageable components, so that both our clients and ourselves can understand them better. What makes for 'good' UI and UX? How can we test for all of this? Does the client need to be sold all this, or is it just a part of our job? How do we convince them that any of this is even relevant for their, as of now, unvisited website? As always we try to keep it simple and break it down into more manageable parts. Check out the episode and please leave comments to let us know how we're doing...
So online courses are all the rage. We know that. Especially since Covid struck, people have been looking for ways to create extra revenue from the knowledge that they have, and well, courses are a good way to do that. Wishlist Member has been around for years, in fact I think that it's right up there with a few others as one of the oldest membership site solutions for WordPress. We talk about the history of the plugin; how it got started, why they decided to take a punt on a small but growing CMS, and how it's been going for the last decade. We then get into the courses add-on which allows you to create courses and link them to memberships. Check out the podcast...
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. We are on Season 2 where we are looking at The Design Process. Today we are discussing "Creating a brand". With so much to take in, we needed to split the subject up into seven, easy to understand, sections. So take a listen to the podcast and hit up the comments if you think that we missed anything.
When I drive my car, I'm highly aware of the impact that my driving is having. I can hear the engine rumble, I can smell the gases that are coming from the exhaust. I know for a fact that this is not good for the environment. I'm burning energy and it's causing pollution. When I'm browsing the internet, this is the environmental impact that I'm feeling... nothing. Literally zero. I almost never connect the fact that my browsing and the websites that I create have an environmental impact. My computers are shiny, my phone screen has rounded edges and looks really nice. How could they possibly do any damage to the environment, and even if they did, my part is so small that it does not matter... right? Perhaps not. The statistics tell another story, and it's not something that we can be complacent about. Today I'm chatting with Marco Berrocal from Green Geeks, which is a WordPress website host which has a focus upon hosting with the impact on the environment at the forefront of their offering. We talk about what we can do to reduce our internet carbon footprint and how we can build websites which cause less pollution.
On the podcast today we continue our WordPress Business Bootcamp series. Now we're trying to figure out "How do we get our website copy?". It's a thorny issue and I'm pretty certain that this problem has held up one or other of your website builds in the past. Who should create the content that goes on the site? Should it be you, a professional copywriter, an SEO expert or perhaps we leave that to the client and just place Lorem placeholders in until they're ready? The problem though is that the text is really crucial for the success of a website, and therefore it's crucial to get it right. Not only will Google like it, but the way that your site looks, the structure of it all hangs on how the words fit in the overall design that you've decided upon. So listen to the podcast as we discuss this topic and leave some feedback...
On the podcast today we have JR Farr and Gilbert Pellegrom from a new platform called Lemon Squeezy. Lemon Squeezy is a SaaS based platform with a WordPress integration. Which enables you to sell digital products online? So things like PDFs, eBooks, software licensing... anything you can think of really. If it's possible to package it up and sell it directly on your website, Lemon Squeezy is here to help with that. It makes running a digital products business easier by taking away some of the boring tasks. Check out the podcast...
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. We're on series 2, episode 2. "How do we structure our clients' websites?" We're trying to figure out which parts of a website does our client really need from the outset. There's hundreds of things that we can do, but as the budget is tight, what are the things that we're going to suggest that the client implement to get the most from this fledgling site? Do they need something specific in the header? What about lead magnets or landing pages? Which pages are essential at the start and how are we going to measure the success of what we're building over time? There's a lot in here, and it may be that you've in a habit of doing things in a certain way, and this conversation might make you stop and have a rethink about the structure of your clients' websites. Go listen...
So your WordPress website is up and running. You're growing. The website is getting noticed. Wonderful. You add in some products as well, and it keeps growing. Even more wonderful. Then you hit a wall. The language barrier. Your site has reached the natural boundaries of who can access the content on your site because it's only in your native language. This is fine, if that's the only audience you ever want to reach. But why would you do that? One of the best parts of an online business is that it's not constrained by geography. Anyone, anywhere in the world can see your site. But can they read it? Today on the podcast we talk about the WPML plugin for WordPress and how it can make your site international; translated for all the world to consume. Go listen to the podcast...
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. We're on Season 2, Episode 1, and it's all about what the whole web design / build process might look like. As is so often the case we're wearing many, many hats in the work that we do, and that's really what this episodes emphasises. How to we set the expectations, get the designs, understand the mood, decide upon sources of traffic, think about SEO, agree on colours and fonts. See, I told you you'd need many hats! We cover what we've done in the past and what we think might work for us going forward in our WordPress website businesses. Have a listen to the podcast...
WP Builds is all about the WordPress community, but we're not alone in that. There are many places that you can hang out to find out what's going on, news updates, product launches and stories about members of the community. HeroPress is one such place, and it's been putting out great content about members of the community for years. Today on the podcast we have Cate and Topher DeRosia, the founders and curators of HeroPress as they talk about their plans to expand so that you can find all the WordPress content your heart desires in as few places as possible. It's a lovely episode with a couple of really excellent members of our community. Go have a listen...
To stay in business, you need to keep working. That usually means more clients. But where does this never ending conveyor belt of clients come from? What can you do to avoid gaps in your work roster? There's no magic bullet, and likely there's disappointment along the way. But you'll get into a pattern of gaining work at some point, but it's good to discuss some of the things that we've tried before. Find out what they might be in the Podcast today...
So today we're talking about security, but not what you might expect. This episode is not about the features which are in a WordPress security plugin. This is about the very nature of hacking and the issues that face us all online. What do people do hacking at all? It's a pretty reasonable question! It's now simply assumed that the internet can be a dangerous place; your details could be stolen, your website could be hacked. But why? What's in it for the hackers? Robert Abela is on the podcast today to discuss this and many other topics, and it's a really interesting chat? What security posture should you adopt based upon what you do. It's somewhere between 'do nothing' and 'live in a bunker'! What software is out there which might be worth looking into for all your security needs, and what resources does Robert recommend if you discover that you're curious to learn more? Check out the podcast...
Welcome to another in our Business Bootcamp series. It’s the series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites, and running a web design business from start to finish. Presently, we are on Season 1 (where we look at what needs to happen) before the build. Have we set the right expectation? Nathan and David are taking different routes to get our invented businesses going and our client’s website up. In this episode we tackle how you might get your client expectations set up, and what those expectations might be. This includes things like what points typically cause friction in a web project, how can we effectively gather content, what channels of communication are we going to use, how will we handle revisions, and the worst of them all... clients just ghosting us. It's an interesting chat and we cover a lot of ground. Go check out the podcast.
So this is one of those episodes where you might learn something completely new. Buddy Works (often just called Buddy) is a great tool for saving you some real time, and who does not want more time? Think Zapier, but for all-the-things related to web development. So there's a ton of different things that you do over and over again. No matter what business you're in, there's always going to be repetition. Most of us specialise in something so that we can offer that skill to the market. We have done the same thing many times so that we can become an expert at something. What you quickly realise when you've done something a few times is that you now know how to do. You might describe your skill level like this... "I could do that in my sleep". But you can't do that in your sleep, can you... because, erm... you're asleep! But someone, or something, else could. So, introducing Maciek Palmowski and Luke Pasisz. They're here to explain what Buddy Works can do and how you get started. Buddy Works is a tool which allows you to create complex pipelines. You've got a job that you feel is not really the best use of your time? Buddy Works will take that job from you and do it repeatedly. It will not get bored and complain, and you will be happier! I will not lie to you. It's not like Jarvis in the Avengers. You don't get to just 'think', "mmm... I'm fed up with this task. Will you please take it off my hands and do it?". You're going to have to learn how Buddy Works works (I like that sentence)! And that's the purpose of the podcast today. So give the episode a listen and see if Buddy Works will help you automate tasks and save time.
Welcome to another in our Business Bootcamp series. It’s the series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites, and running a web design business from start to finish. Today we're thinking about the legal side of things... agreements / contracts and payments. How would you handle this as someone new to the industry. Do you even need a contract? Perhaps you're starting out and making a website for a friend, in which case the situation might be different, but do you owe it to yourself to protect you and your business from things which might go wrong... late payment / no payment, absent client who never returns your calls, a client who is simply unreasonable in their expectations of your time. It's really only after you've been doing this for a while that you might start to realise that some form of legal protection is a good idea, but where do you go to get that? You could try a lawyer, but that might be expensive. You could make something up, but that might not really protect you. You could download something from the internet, but that might not cover all the things that you need covering. So many things! Fins out what we've done in the past, the mistakes that we've made and where you might find some useful resources. Go check out the podcast...
The back story goes like this. I (Nathan) co-host the Page Builder Summit with my friend Anchen le Roux. We invite a range of speakers to come onto that podcast and create presentations which, it is hoped, the attendees will enjoy. We do not pay the speakers for their contributions. We make this very clear and communicate it in advance. There's an exchange here, but it's not the usual one of 'you create something and I will pay you for it'. It's more of a 'here is an audience you might like to present to if you're willing'. Joe thinks that this model needs a re-think; payment ought to happen. So we talk about how event organisers should think about giving value back to their presenters. We are certainly on different sides of the debate here, but the conversation is polite and we each hear one another out. It was not really an endeavour to change one another's minds... more, an attempt to air our thoughts and make clear why we think the way we do. If you're thinking of being a speaker at an event, or you're thinking of organising an event this could be a really interesting conversation. It might well shine a spotlight on issues that you never even considered and make both sides have more empathy, especially when the event deadlines are tight and expectations are put under stress.
Welcome to another in the WordPress Business Bootcamp series. It’s the series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. Presently, we are on Season 01 (of the series which is looking at the things that need to happen) 'Before the Build'. This is episode 03... "Getting a brief and scoping the project". So this is really all about making the first contact, making an impression and letting the client know how you work and what they can expect. There's so many possible routes that you can take here. Are you going to meet face-to-face or work on Zoom? What are the ways that you're going to communicate the expected budget? How will you explain your processes to see if you're a good fit for one another? How do you qualify them as a 'good' client? Do you introduce care plans at this point? There's so much more to this, but you're going to have to listen to the show to find out more...
Compress your images for a quick way to get a faster website with the EWWW plugin. See how it works on the podcast today with founder Shane Bishop. Go listen...
Welcome to another in the WP Business Bootcamp series. It’s the series where we relearn EVERYTHING we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. The Premise of this series is that we have our first potential website client. All we know is that she is a lawyer in a large city. She asked a mutual friend who thought of us. We have few skills and no business or processes in place. She has no previous website. No branding or copy. As we go through the series, Nathan and David will be taking different routes to get our business going and our client’s website up and running. Presently, we are on Season 1 of the series which is looking at the things that need to happen before the build. Today we're trying to figure out how we might think about charging for the services that we offer, and as always, there's more to this than meets the eye... fixed v value pricing, being competitive, discounting, bundling services together and much more. Check out the podcast and leave us a comment with your thoughts...
You use WooCommerce, because you need an eCommerce platform and you like WordPress. It's kind of the default isn't it? WordPress + eCommerce = WooCommerce. Well, on the show today we have Kelly Muro, who want you to rewrite that equation so that it reads like this: WordPress + eCommerce = North Commerce! But, I'm guessing that you've not heard of North Commerce. Well, neither had I until a few weeks ago when it came across my radar, and so I thought that I'd put it on your radar too. You can thank me later! So North Commerce is intended to be a full replacement for WooCommerce, with all the basic bells and whistles covered, but that kind of platform does not get built overnight, and so, as of right now, North Commerce is still in alpha / beta testing, so it might be a great time to hop on board and get your voice heard. You never know, you might even be able to influence the way that the platform is built out? So if you're looking for WooCommerce alternatives, this is a interesting chat, about a (possibly) disruptive product, and certainly worth a listen...
In this brand new, and huge series of podcast episodes we try to re-learn everything that we know about running a WordPress website business. We start from the idea that we've got our first potential client, but we have no prior experience. So where do we start? What do we do? Where do we go to find inspiration? What methodologies could assist us towards becoming profitable? Join us on this journey as we start the "WordPress Business Bootcamp"! Check out the podcast...
One the more challenging things to do when creating a website is to write effective copy. In the era of Page Builders, getting the site to look good and work well is easier than ever... but getting effective and compelling copy on your site is as hard as it's ever been. In fact, with the competition out there, all trying to get the same SEO juice as you are, it might be harder than it's ever been. Unless you're a pro at this you might struggle, and your clients might be even worse. Step up Todd E. Jones and his Website Copy Framework. We talked on the podcast about why Todd built the product and what it contains. It's essentially a collection of templates for all the different components you need to put on your website. It makes it easier for you to understand how to get started and what effective copywriting is. So if you need help with your copywriting, check out the podcast and see if the Website Copy Framework might get you writing better copy.
We could have tried to eke this one out. According to one online crossword solver there are 378 Words Starting With X, but I imagine X for xeroxed - how to copy your WP website, might be going too far! So we just decided to end with a pathetic whimper! (We should have had a Family Fortunes styled game show thing. "Let’s see if it’s on the board! You said, flush your permalinks. Our survey of 100 WordPress experts said’ Uh - Urrr! I’m afraid you’ll not be going home with the Goblin TeasMaid and bone china cup and saucer set). You have to be British and of a certain age to understand that! Instead... X is for what not to do with WordPress (according to the fine people of the interwebs) as in X for cross out / delete. Y for why we should still use WordPress (seems more relevant with such changes going on). Finally lots of Zzzz's is for, got to sleep... it’s time to put this series to bed.
This week’s WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 8th November 2021 Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including… Pagely has been bought by GoDaddy – what does this mean? WP Builds has released a silly version of the WordPress Awards for 2021, please donate to…
So perhaps you're really into writing. You live and breathe it. You wake up in the morning and can't wait to get out the laptop and start bashing away. The ideas flow out of you all the time; never ending. You're like a tap fully turned on. Mmm. This is not you though is it. It's more likely that you need to write, have to write, are required to write, but sometimes the ideas just don't come to you. You stare at the blank screen and your artistic juices don't flow. You get stuck, frustrated and write less than you need to. You're a rusty tap, dripping once in a while! What you need is some help. You need something to give you a little push; to set you on the road. Bertha.ai is a WordPress plugin which brings A.I. writing help into your website content creation process. Wherever you write text in your WordPress website, Bertha is there to give you a hand, to help you get started. Find out how it works and what it's useful for. Check out the podcast...
Writing is such a complex process. When we started to think about this topic, we thought that it would be really straightforward, but after some reflection, it turns out that there's a lot to say. Are you writing for yourself, for prose, for business, for a third party? Your relationship with that writing will be dramatically altered by the 'why' of the writing. What about this interface? Do you like it plain and simple, or perhaps you like all the bells and whistles so that you can get in the weeds of sizing and fonts? Perhaps writing is becoming a dying art. With social platforms promoting short, disposable text, are we dumbing down on what we write, as well as destroying our attention spans for reading? And what about AI? Perhaps there's going to be no need to write in the future; you'll just suggest things to some SaaS app and the writing is done for you? As I say, there's lots to discuss here and I hope that you enjoy the podcast...
So... you build WordPress websites and you love it. You know what you don't love? Policies. Admit it, you don't do you? The last thing that you want to be spending your time on is ensuring that you've got all your websites, and those of your clients, up-to-date with the latest policies. The reason for this is pretty obvious. You're the website building expert, but you're not a legal expert... well, you're not likely to be. Step up Termageddon to make all this go away! On the podcast today we learn about how Termageddon can make all of your legal dramas go away with their easy to use service. Check out the podcast...
It was going to be V for Virus, but we have probably had enough of the word right now, and vulnerabilities perhaps better describes what we are really talking about here - WordPress security. This is where we are different and roles are reversed. Nathan listens to podcasts on IT security and sees the worst that can happen. David remains relatively clueless and feel invincible! He's fixed about 7 hacked sites. None due to his management and the issues have not returned. It made him feel like he was king of the world! We're not experts in this by any means, but we do like to think about it and talk about it... So check out the podcast today and let us know what you think...
So you have a WordPress website and it's all built and handed over to the client. You're done! Hurrah! Wait a minute, you're not done are you? Chances are that you've used some simple tools for uptime monitoring. You know what I mean. The kind of tools that periodically ping your website and report back if the site is still alive. You might even have gone a step further and employed a tool that offers you some sort of visual feedback. It will make sure that the site of yesterday looks like the site of today, and in this way you can be sure that nothing untoward has occurred. But what if you wanted to go a step further? What if you wanted to check all-the-things, and not just make sure that the website is up, but that the website is working. There is a difference! Today we speak to Justin Klemm about Ghost Inspector, which is tool which can do many, many things to make sure that your site is up and working. It's more options than you can shake a stick and might save you the late night client call, because you knew and fixed things before they even knew about it!
This is about common WordPress mistakes and how to get out of a pickle if things go wrong. With all the plugins, themes and community work in WordPress, it's often surprising that any of it hangs together, and that WordPress websites even work at all... (even more so since the Gutenberg Project says David!). Yet, despite that, neither of us have really had any issues over the years. How can this be? There's certainly plenty of scope for things to go wrong on your WordPress website, and to go wrong badly, and that's the subject of the podcast today. What can go wrong and how might you recover. Check out the podcast...
So on the podcast today we have Joshua Vandercar from Gravity Hopper which is a plug that allows you to have a central dashboard for all your Gravity Forms. Joshua is employed by Rocket Genius, the developers of Gravity Forms, so he knows a thing or two about how it all works! The idea is that you create a standalone install of WordPress is put the Gravity Hopper plugin on there and from that moment on you have a central dashboard from which you can handle all of your forms on all of your websites. With Gravity Hopper you can squirrel those forms away and deploy them with just a few clicks on other sites. In fact the magic goes a little further than that, because it might be that you only want to deploy a collection of commonly used fields and not entire forms? That's possible too, and so are field groups, sections and so on. There's a lot more to the plugin than this, so check out the podcast today and see if Gravity Hopper can help you save time and effort with your Gravity Forms.
WordPress themes are crucial, you have to have one, but will they continue to be so in an era of Full Site Editing? We talk on the podcast today about the WordPress themes that we've used over the years. Starting out by being beguiled by themes which could do all-the-things, then moving towards theme frameworks and minimal themes which allowed some basic styling, but then got out of the way of our Page Builder so that we could create headers and footers that way. Which themes do we like and what do we think the future holds with themes appearing to be of less importance in WordPress' future. Are you exploring new themes? Are you a theme developer worried about the direction of travel? Listen to the podcast and let us know your thoughts...
So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love... You get the idea! If you're anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you've spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they've been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we're even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we've got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he's built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it...
So today on the podcast David and Nathan talk about SEO. David certainly knows more about this than Nathan does, but neither of us claim to be experts! It's a hard subject to ever feel happy about as there's never an end to it all. Google keeps changing what you need to do and you're always under a barrage of new information from all over the internet. So in this episode, we just say it as we see it. What do we need to do and what are some of the tools that we've used to make our WordPress websites have good SEO and page ranking in the search engines? Go check out the podcast...
There are so many tools that you open up each day to do your job as a WordPress website builder or developer. In fact, I'd go as far as say that if you actually counted up the tools that you use each month, it's going to be way more that you think. There's graphics to create, template to conjure up, themes and plugins to discover and implement, emails to send, ways of getting client content... Honestly, the list just goes on and on. Inspired by suggestions from the WP Builds Facebook Group, we decided to put together a podcast highlighting some of the resources you use. There's some real gems in here... honestly, so go check out the podcast today to find out more...
If I got you to list out all of the things that you'd like your WordPress websites to be, I'm pretty sure that the word "fast" would be pretty close to the top of that list. It's super important for your website to be fast. Good hosting is crucial to your website's speed and today on the podcast we've got Remkus de Vries from Servebolt to explain why they think that they're fast, like really fast! There's a whole lot going on with their technology stack which is pretty unique and so it's well worth a listen to the podcast to find out if Servebolt is a good choice for your next WordPress website. Go listen...
It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today is for Q for Quibble, which is a slight objection or criticism about a trivial matter and here we are looking at those objections and criticism from both outside the WordPress community and from within. There's so many little things that we wish we could change and they add up to quite a lot, but looked at individually, they're really not too bad. So this podcast is one long moan about all the little things that we wish we could alter about WordPress. It feels good to let all this out! Go check out the podcast...
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...
WordPress plugins... there are so many to choose from, but it's perhaps the fact that they exist that makes WordPress the huge success that it is. So what's the point of a plugin and how do they differ from themes. Will blocks be a replacement in the future? We get into the subject of what are the 'essential' plugins that we think every WordPress site needs and which ones we have earmarked as our favourites. This discussion could have gone on for hours, but thankfully it didn't! Find out what we think about WordPress plugins in the podcast today...
So you might not have heard about the WordPress security company Patchstack before, but you will likely know about them! You see, until recently, they were called WebARX, but they decided that this was a somewhat confusing, and hard to pronounce name, and so changed it to Patchstack. We talk today to founder Oliver Sild, and get to the bottom of why and how the re-branding went as well as what new features have been added to the platform at the time of the changeover. You might be able to assist their security efforts and get paid into the bargain with their Red Team initiative. Go check out the podcast...
If something is free then it's likely not very good. That's the generally accepted wisdom is most aspects of life, but not with WordPress! WordPress like many other software platforms is free to use and free to modify. It's yours to use as you see fit, and you don't have to pay a penny for it. This is great, and it's all underpinned by a the 'philosophy' of the Open Source. Today in the podcast we talk about what this means and how it plays out for WordPress in particular. It's got huge benefits, but also some significant downsides. Maybe you contribute back to the WordPress project, or earn a living off the back of the development and popularity of it, there's sure to be something in this episode, so go and take a listen...
So your first thought might well be this "Why do I need to look at yet another form plugin? What I've already got works fine." Well... just put that sentiment on the shelf somewhere and have a look at WS Form. When you've done that, and done it properly, tell me that you're not impressed with what it offers! Today I'm chatting to the WS Form founder and developer Mark Westguard, and he's going to tell you in his own words why you might want to take a look. It's a truly remarkable for solution and will enable you to create very complex forms with a simple to use interface. Not to mention that it connects with all-the-things that you could wish for. Check out the podcast...
WordPress is a huge and growing platform. But, just how huge is it? Well, today we answer this and many other utterly unrelated questions as we lift the lid on the numbers in WordPress. How many plugins, how many WordCamps, number of plugins, which languages. It's all in this episode. When we were researching this, it was honestly amazing just how big some of the numbers get. So join us today as we talk through WordPress by the numbers! Check out the podcast now...
This week’s WordPress news for the week commencing 21st June 2021 Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including… New data about how dominant WordPress is in the CMS marketplace Elementor by-the-numbers – just how big is it as a platform in a platform Are Blocks going…
If you're creating newsletters for your content and you use WordPress, put that quill down and check out the podcast today. Newsletter Glue is a really great blocks product that I'm sure many of you are going to love. TL;DR you can create all your blog posts and emails at-the-same-time in the WordPress Block Editor. It's a huge time saver. Write once, publish on the web and to your list at the same time. It works with all the major email providers and I'm honestly loving using it. Not only that, but the WP Builds folk are going to get 15% off the plugin - check out the post for details. This is one not to miss and your email sending clients will love it too. Check out the podcast...
Menus are really rather important, although really underrated. They are, after all, the way that we make our way around the websites that we visit. So how should we think about them? At what point to they get discussed (if at all) in the website building process? There's more than you might think to this conversation... what type of menu works best, how do we add accessibility options into our menus, how do we create our menus and are we going to be using the new capabilities when WordPress' Full Site Editing enables us to handle the styling of our menus in WordPress core? Have a listen to the podcast and don't forget to drop a comment if you think that we got anything wrong! Go listen...
Check out the new Infinite Uploads plugin on the WP Builds podcast today. I'm joined by co-founder, Josh Dailey, who explains what it's all about, which is making your site faster. It sucks up your WordPress Media Library files and puts them in their cloud and serves them from +50 global points of presence... it all looks and behaves the same, it all happens in the background. We get into their tech stack and how they make sure that your media is safe and served up quickly. We also talk about their scalable pricing model and how they avoid vendor lock in by making it easy to download your files at any time. So if you're interested in making your website media load quickly, this is a must listen...
Today we talk about WordPress website page speed and why this is important, how you can measure it and some ideas about what you can do to improve it. There's quite a lot to say about this, and it's really timely with Google's Core Web Vitals (CWV) coming on-stream in the near future. We talk about what CWV is and what it's measuring, what WordPress loads out of the box, what tools you can use to measure your website page speed as well as what plugins you might consider to address any bottlenecks that you discover. How does hosting play into all this as well. As I say, there's a lot of ground to cover, so go check out the podcast to see what we think...
PeachPay is a new 1-click-checkout option for your WooCommerce store. It aims to remove some of the friction of getting people to click the 'buy now' button by removing multiple steps for people who've used PeachPay before. We talk about how it works, debunk some myths, and discuss why you might want to think about add this to your WooCommerce website. If you build eCommerce websites for clients, you need to know about this solution and how it could improve their sales. Go listen...
In this episode of the podcast we asked you submit what you thought were some Killer Tips for creating your WordPress websites, and you did not disappoint! So there's loads of useful little nuggets of information in here, many of them might be new to you. It never ceases to amaze me just how my processes differ from other people doing the exact same job, and how much I could learn from other WordPress professionals. Well in this episode of the podcast, we kinda make that possible! Go check it out!
In today’s world there is no difference between “digital” and “physical” products insofar as the transactional engine of your website is concerned. While it may have been true in the past that certain products like EDD were focused on capabilities for those who sell digitally licensed subscription software, that is no longer a factor, as the capability exists for WooCommerce to do everything. Since WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins in the entire WordPress ecosystem, why “wouldn’t” anyone use it for all purposes? And that's what the podcast is about today, a plugin called LaunchFlows which will help you supercharge your WooCommerce store. Go listen...
This episode is about all the many, many, many jobs that you do each and every time you build a WordPress website for yourself or for a client. There really are so many! I'm not too sure that I do quite as much as David does, because, as you'll hear, he's does rather a lot. From setting hosting and email, from forms to security, this episode could have gone on for a long time. Maybe you treat each project individually, or have a template that you keep coming back to. Go listen to the podcast today and tell us what you think...
I've often thought about building my WordPress websites on the one day model, it's got so much going for it. I've heard stories of quite a few people who are managing this very effectively. However, it's always been something that I've associated with a single freelancer. I'd always assumed that the margins were pretty tight, and therefore most likely to work with one person. Well, Candy Phelps is on the podcast today to tell me (and you) otherwise! She's built a business creating websites in a day with a team, and, as you might have guessed, it's all about the process. If you get the process right from the start, you can make this work, as you'll have all your ducks in a row, so that there's no time wasted and every member of your team know what to do and when to do it. It's pretty interesting to see how this all hangs together. Go listen...
The web is made up of Pictures and Words. Some of those pictures are moving (video), but it's basically just those two things. We have easy ways to deal with putting photos and other kinds of images onto our WordPress websites with the features that are baked in, but there's so much more to this topic. What kind of images are the best to use? How many thumbnail sizes should we be storing? Should we be serving our images over a CDN? Is it a good idea to compress our images so that they make a more lean loading experience? Where can we source our images? What software is good for quick alterations to the images that we've got. Honestly, there are a dozen more questions, but you get the idea that there's a lot more to images than meets the eye. Go listen to the podcast to find out more...
Having a newsletter is one of the best ways that you can communicate with an audience. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, that it's the best. There's no third-party platform involved. You are communicating with people who have signed up, and therefore really want to get your content. But, it can be a dull job keeping the content flowing. Today we learn about a SaaS platform which might just make that job a lot less painful. I've started to use it and it's shaved hours out of my week. Go listen to the podcast today to find out more...
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...
Gutenberg is here to stay, and love it or hate it, it's going to be a feature of WordPress for years to come. On the podcast today David and Nathan discuss Gutenberg and what they think of it. It's certainly getting better over time, and as a pure text editing tool, it's now pretty great. However, it's got ambitions to become a Full Site Editing (FSE) tool in the near future and that path collides with current Page Builders. So is it a useful alternative to them, or are you not convinced? Perhaps you can see that the roadmap makes it worth keeping an eye on, perhaps you're already using it to build your WordPress websites? Listen to the podcast today and let us know what you think of Gutenberg...
So it might have passed you by, but now we can (and apparently do) all create our own T.V. channels! Services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and Vimeo make this process pretty much painless, but pretty much painless is not completely painless; and that's the subject of the podcast today. A WordPress plugin called WP Livestream which makes this as simple as possible to get your livestream on your WordPress website. Set it up once and forget about it. Find out more from the developer of the plugin, Nathan Parikh, on the WP Builds podcast today...
It’s another of chats in the series called the A-Z of WordPress where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP. Today is F for... Forms. We expect most sites to have a contact form. Something that does not require the visitor to launch an email client, but there's so many other things that forms plugins have brought under their control. Payments, user registration, post creation and much more. We're also very lucky that the WordPress forms space is so competitive; so many great options to choose from. So today on the podcast we talk about forms, what we've used, what we like and what they can be used for. Go check out the podcast...
So the podcast today might catch you a little off guard! It's not something that I've ever played with before. Today we're talking about Shoutworks, which is a WordPress plugin that lets you boost your voice SEO by creating an Amazon Alexa skill in one click right from inside WordPress. Wait... What! Is this even a thing? Why would I ever want to do that? Well, the short version is that you can use devices like Alexa to alert your audience / customers when you've got updates that they might be interested in. Marketers are always looking for new ways to engage and inform audiences, and this is certainly new. Find out more on the podcast today and leave a comment so that we know what you think...
It’s another of our chats in the series called the 'A-Z of WordPress', where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP. Today is 'E' for... Ecommerce. There's just so much to say here because WordPress and Ecommerce are growing at a phenomenal rate. With so much activity, you'd think that there might be a 'best' way to build an online shop. But as is so often the case with WordPress, there's multiple ways to achieve the same goal. So today on the podcast we talk about our experiences with WordPress as well as surface some of the plugins and themes that we've come across over the years to make your WordPress / WooCommerce shop a reality. Go check it out...
Today we're talking about the DocketWP WordPress plugin with Andre Gagnon and Kyle Van Deusen, the project founders. So, what does it do and why might you want it? It's a plugin that provides you with an easy to access to-do list right inside of your WordPress dashboard. You can sync this list in the cloud so that you, or your team are always doing the tasks that are needed. You also get pre-written tasks lists from industry leaders ready to download so that you're up to speed about SEO, care plans etc. in as little time as possible. It's a small plugin, but one which could possibly have large implications upon your productivity. Check out the podcast today to find out more...
It’s the 4th in our series of chats called 'the A-Z of WordPress' where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today, we are really going set pulses racing with the letter 'D' for Database! The word alone sounds incredibly dull, and for years I pretended it did not exist. Even now I do anything to avoid directly interacting with it. But I do now appreciate how essential it is to the health and speed of a WordPress website. I’m now quite interested in how plugins and themes interact with the database. All that being said, this episode is one of those where we talk about things that we don't really understand. Being website builders, both David and I tend to just allow the database to exist and we try to ignore it. There's loads in here though, so have a listen to the podcast and let us know what you think...
So if you're a user of WooCommerce, then the podcast today will be of interest to you. It's all about creating the best checkout experience to increase conversions with the CheckoutWC plugin. The checkout process of WooCommerce 'out-of-the-box' is okay, but it's not all that great. Yes, it works, but you know that you've seen better workflows; better ways of guiding you through the final stages of your purchase. The guest on the show today, Clifton Griffin, has been working for the last two years at getting the WooCommerce cart experience as painless as possible with his CheckoutWC plugin. Check it out on the podcast today...
It’s the third in our series of chats called the A-Z of WordPress, where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today, it’s the letter 'C' for Caching (including server side caching, front end caching (plugins) and CDNs. However, we avoid getting too deeply into page load times and scores, which we cover separately on another podcast. So what is the point of caching? What does it do and how might we do it with our WordPress websites. It's certainly a complex subject, and we don't have all the answers, but we do surface some good plugins that you might not have heard of. Check out the podcast...
We all know that the WordCamps in 2020 got cancelled. This was a good idea because saving lives comes before attending online events, but I thought that it might be a good idea to get someone on the WP Builds podcast to have a chat with us about WordCamps nonetheless. Why, you might ask? Well, can you imagine what it would be like to be a part of a team who had worked extremely hard to get an event like WordCamp Asia, or WordCamp Europe up and running, only to have to cancel it with just a few days and weeks to go? I could not imagine that, and so I talked to someone who could. Someone who has firsthand experience working on a WordCamp and then having to pivot it into an online event. So find out what's involved in setting up a WordCamp on the podcast today...
I'm sure that we've all had experiences with our WordPress websites where things went wrong; the site was hacked, something got deleted. In most cases we can recover, but if the worst comes to the worst we need a backup to save us. As with all things in the WordPress space, we're spoiled in the number of backup options available to us. There's plugins backups, our hosting backups, 3rd party SaaS backups and more. So which should we use? In this episode of the WP Builds Podcast we explore the pros and cons of the different backup types and why you might want to pick one over another. Have a listen to our thoughts on the podcast...
Writing is important. It's one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity. In fact, it may very well be the most important. But we can all agree that not all writing is equal. Most of the writing that we create and read has nothing to do with prose. It's the news that we consume, the recipes we crib from, the information that we study and the emails / letters that we use to communicate. In these situations, it's important to write in a clear and understandable way. Errors in grammar, spelling and structure stand out and spoil the flow of what you're trying to get across. So step up ProWritingAid to the rescue! It's a tool built by Chris Banks, the guest on the podcast today. Listen now to see why he built it and how it might help your own writing.
So this is a new series called the 'A-Z of WordPress' in which David and Nathan discuss a topic starting with the next letter of the alphabet. To kick us off, it's A is for Appointments. WordPress works as a great platform for allowing bookings and appointments. There's heaps of plugins which will allow you or your clients to sync their calendar, take payments etc. What are those plugins and are they superior to SaaS alternatives? Perhaps you want to integrate an appointment system into your WordPress website, or maybe you want to pay a company to take this process over for you. There's lots to talk about so join David and Nathan on this new series. Go check out the podcast...
If you have a product or service, it's critical that you have a mechanism for users to be able to offer their feedback. That could be comments, but perhaps more importantly you'd like to offer your users a way to help you make the product better. Give them a way that they can suggest features and vote for the features that others have already suggested. Better yet, it'd be nice to be able to display all of that on an easy to understand Kanban style roadmap. Today we've got a WordPress plugin which can do just that. Listen to the podcast today to find out more...
So for those who don’t know what ClassicPress is we had better say... It's fork of WordPress 4.9 before the Gutenberg block editor was introduced and a reaction to the decision, it was started by a Laravel developer called Scott Bowler, a long term WordPress user who first campaigned for Gutenberg not to go into core (at least without being a majority support for it), and it started in August 2018 and continues to be developed with folk writing plugins solely for it, as well as some forking of other needed plugins like eCommerce and SEO options. All that said, why would anyone want to use it over good 'ol WordPress? Find out what we think in our final debate of the season...
There are some companies in the WordPress space that are very much on the rise and today we're speaking to Shahjahan Jewel about his company WP Manage Ninja, and they certainly are rising! I heard about WP Manage Ninja about a year ago, when they did a lifetime deal sale on their WP Fluent Forms plugin. After some research, I hopped on the deal and I"ve never looked back. It's become my go-to plugin for forms because of it's reliability and fast pace of development. The features that they've added have been useful and well executed. There's loads more to this company, not least the new Fluent CRM plugin. Listen to the podcast to find out more...
FOMO (fear of missing out) has become a really common tool in online sales and marketing of late. Wherever things are sold, this tool is used. Whether it's a clock ticking down, a stock counter or a lifetime deal that's never to be repeated, I'm sure that we've all seen this tactic and most likely fallen for it. So what's the point of using FOMO? Does it work and is it ethical? It feels like we're just starting on this FOMO journey and marketers will get better at using it to drive sales with ever more ingenious implementations. On the podcast today we talk about where we're seen this in use in the WordPress space and whether or not we think it's effective. Go check out the podcast to find out more...
Flipping domains can be a profitable business and today on the WP Builds WordPress podcast we're going to be hearing about how and why you might want to look into doing it. There's more than you might think! In it's simplest form, flipping is the process of buying (or selling) a domain. In the real world businesses are bought and sold all the time, there's nothing unusual about it at all, but buying a current domain can be a little harder, and Flippa is a platform that's designed to take all of that difficulty away! Whether that's the job of locating a website / domain / app (and more) that you might want to buy, to actually taking care of all the minutiae of getting the deal done. Blake Hutchison is here to explain how it all works. Go check it out...
This Week in WordPress #137 - Changes are coming and sucking in Black Friday - A WP Builds Podcast
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...
This is one of those warm and fuzzy episodes! It's all about Wendie and her journey with WordPress. There's no product here, no tutorial, just a good, old fashioned chat about WordPress with a thoroughly lovely person! Wendie and I have been chatting on and off for years. It all started back in the day that both of us were going through the WP Elevation program and we decided to be accountability partners. We chatted from time to time during that and drifted in and our of conversations online for many years. We met in person at WordCamp London in 2018 as well as WordCamp Europe in 2019. She's been working in the WordPress space for years and has a really interesting story to tell. So have a listen to the podcast to find out more...
Nathan says 'Matte and Glossy' sound like a Las Vegas cabaret act so David's down for a quick win on this one! This is a little bit of a sham debate as it is as silly as matte or gloss paper. But some designers have a preference for one over the other and all of us who make websites probably need to consider that visitors may have vastly different experiences depending on what they use. It's quite surprising when you look into this how much the screen that your beautifully designed WordPress website is viewed upon can impact how it looks. I mostly assume that what I design is what everyone sees, but it's just not the case. The screen really, really matter. So whish is best... Find out what we think on the podcast this week...
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...
So, you're a WordPress website creator. You sell your websites to clients far and wide, or at least that's the hope. We all know though that the reality is that finding new clients can be hard and keeping them can be harder. The question in this episode of the podcast is, what's the best approach for attracting new clients. Should you go for anyone and everyone, or are you best targeting your efforts at a particular niche? Well, it's not that easy and there are pros and cons to both options. Today on the podcast, which by the way is episode 200 (yay!), we discuss which is best. Honestly, it throws up some unexpected results. In the end you'll have to decide for yourself, but perhaps listening to others debate this point might get you on the right track! Go listen...
Today we hear all about Kadence Blocks, the Kadence Theme and Kadence Membership from the creator, Benjamin Ritner. This suite of WordPress tools has been growing in popularity at an amazing rate. Wherever I seem to go, it's being mentioned, and in a very positive light. He's built out a broad set of tools which will enable you to build just about any WordPress website that you could imagine. He prides himself on keeping things lightweight and offering good support. Have a listen to the podcast today to see if Kadence is something to consider in your WordPress toolbelt in the days to come. Go listen...
This debate will never die, but we keep hearing more about it each year. The traditional model is to charge your client a fee that is made clear on your website. You charge a fixed fee for the services that your provide. But now we've got value pricing which says charge the client based upon the value that you bring to their business. More profit for you. But is this easy to pull off, or does it feel like deception from the client's point of view. One model is simple, the other takes more thought, but offers higher rewards (if you can find the clients). Find out what we think about this debate in the WP Builds Podcast today...
Marketers rejoice! WP Landing Kit is a plugin that you've wanted for ages and ages and now you have it! It allows you to point all of your domains at one WordPress install! You can then control all of your landing pages from one WordPress install, meaning that you save time on updating it and you can use successful page templates with ease. You might not immediatley see the utility of a plugin like this, but after listening to the podcast, you'll realsise that it's a genius idea. Jason Schuller is on the podcast today to talk about how it all works and how you can use it. Go listen...
Should you code or just buy plugins, themes and blocks when building your WordPress website? Many people like to know all the code so that they can create sites that so exactly what they want with zero bloat. That's fine if you've got the time and clients who are willing to pay for all that, but these days there's so many great tools that will enable non-coders to build fantastic WordPress websites. So... to code or not to code, that is the question. Find out what we think on the podcast today...
So this podcast episode is all about translations and how you can do that on your WordPress website. Perhaps you have a legal requirement to have multiple languages on your site, or perhaps you just want to further your reach into different parts of the world. Whatever the reason, doing this stuff manually would be really time consuming. Far better to have a nice, helpful WordPress plugin at hand that will do all the heavy lifting for you. Find out how to that we Weglot on the WP Builds Podcast today...
This week was debate whether it's better to design your WordPress websites with browser based tools like a Page Builder, or use dedicated apps like Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch. Years ago this question was completely absurd. Not only did the tools not exist, but there was almost no conception that the browser might even be capable of image manipulation on the scale that would be needed. Fast forward to today and the tools exist and are excellent. So should you just stay in the browser, educating your clients about WordPress along the way or stay with solutions which have stood the test of time? Find out what we think on the podcast today...
Have you ever wanted to start a YouTube Channel related to WordPress content? You've seen other people out there making a great success of it and you think that it's really easy. Paul Charlton is on the WP Builds Podcast today to chat about what it's really like. It's a slog at times and you need to keep the content fresh and of a high quality. Paul focusses on Elementor, Brizy, ACF and JetEngine but straying into all sorts of other areas too. His content is of exceptional quality and I highly recommend a listen to the podcast to find out more about how he grew his channel and created a niche for himself educating people about how to use WordPress...
Is WordPress the best option for bloggers or do some of the rival services offer a better set of features and ease of use? This argument is not as simple as you might think. I know that we're all into WordPress, but perhaps we need to get some distance and see what the competition is actually doing. Perhaps they have some unique options that WordPress does not have? Perhaps the simplicity is what draws people in, a stripped back set of features that allows you to do what you want and then get out of there - no plugin and theme updates, no security problems, no things breaking that you don't know how to fix. There's quite a bit in the WordPress rival's favour it turns out! Find out our thoughts on the WP Builds podcast...
You need maps on a website like you need butter on toast. I really struggle to think of too many projects that I've built where the client did not want a maps show there business location. It might be that you can get away with a simple Google maps embed, but what if you want something more complex? Well, there's a plugin for that called MapsMarker and it's the topic of the podcast today. Robert Harm, the plugin developer is here to tell us all about it, and when I say 'all', there's honestly a lot to say. This plugin can do lots! Listen to the podcast to find out what...
If you've been building WordPress websites for any length of time, then you know this debate inside out. Should you get all the content from the client before you start the project? The answer is not as simple as you think. There are so many factors at play. Clients who just don't know what they want until they see it. Clients who don't understand your processes. Perhaps you even prefer to iterate your designs as the prject wears on and like the possibility to adapt what the client needs as you go. You might even take of the whole thing and say that you'll supply content and they can overwrite it at a later date when they're ready. Whatever the case may be, you don't want to be help up getting the website built, shipped and paid for because of content! So what's the best appraoch? Find out what we thing on the WP Builds podcast today...
I got into building WordPress websites because I like building websites. Now that is a breathtaking insight I know! But it's important to think about this for a minute. I have no metrics on this, but I know for certain that I spend quite a but of my week just patching up and maintaining websites that I've already built. This is covered by my care plans but I'm not all that sure how profitable my WordPress website care plans are, one month I might do very little, another, I'm inundated! Today on the WP Builds Podcast we have Brad Morrison from GoWP who is here to tell us how they can take this support burden away from you. They'll do all the maintainance, support, updating and content edits for you. Their new service will even build your webpages for you! Have a listen and see if it's for you...
This week on the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast we talk about the subject of static hosting. You've used hosting for years, you know how it works and how to make it work. You're happy. And then people start talking about a clever new way of hosting - static hosting and you've got to throw most of that knowledge out of the window! So... why...? Because it's fast, secure and new, that's why! There really are some major advantages, but there's also some real disadvantages that you need to mindful of; things that might make it a non starter for you and your WordPress website building business. Join us on the podcast today as we talk this whole process through from both sides and see if static hosting is a things that either of us will take on or just some passing technology that's great, but not for us...
How can you prove that you own your website content. That you wrote it on this date? You can use the WordProof plugin which leverages blockchain technology, that's how. It's not just for your blog content though, it could be used for almost anything and that's what makes it so exciting. That song that you recorded, those legal documents that you need to guarantee were updated last week. If you want to prove that something happened to your content on a certain date and time, WordProof is a WordPress plugin which will enable you to do this. It's such a new technology and it's perhaps a little new to most of us so Sebastiaan van der Lans is here to explain how it all works and why you might need it on the WP Builds podcast today!
If you run a WordPress website business then you'll likely have had a run in with a client. You need insurance to protect you... don't you? In this podcast we discuss if it's really needed or whether it's something that you can resonably do without. Do people actually take legal action against the people who build their websites, and if so is there anything substantive that they can get from you, or are we just falling for the insurance salesman and his trap of offering cover for things that we don't really need. Fairly nerdy topic and lots to discuss. Listen to the podcast to find out more...
Do you want to remove boring tasks from your life? Those tasks that you know that you have to do, but just wish someone else would do. Well it's likely that you can automate many of them and James Rose is here to help you do that. He's not suggesting that you automate everything, but tasks that offer you zero return might as well be done by a robot as by you. His favourite tool is Zapier and he really has delved deep into the platform and its inner workings. So much so that he's created a course to save you time as you learn how to save time! Check him out on the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast this week.
Some WordPress freelancers and agencies give clients full admin access to WordPress. Some give another role, such as the Editor role. What works best for you and your clients? Some completely reconfigure and white label the WordPress dashboard. Some give an Editor role for everyday use and an Admin role so they have ownership. I’m sure there are more variations. Perhaps you've changed your position on this over the years, or still have a level of uncertainty. Do you or don't you want clients to see what's going on under the hood with their WordPress website? Check out the WP Builds podcast to find out what we think!
If you're the kind of person who likes to make sure that the website that you hand over to your clients is safe from their clumsy hands, then your might be interested in the podcast today. Wallace Inline is a great tool for making it really easy for people to update their website content. The idea is that you find a place on the page that you want to edit, and you click on it and alter it right there without the need to go into the settings for the module / element. Bradley Kirby comes on the WP Builds Podcast today to talk about what's new with the plugin and how it might save you time when dealing with clients. Check it out.
Are you a WordPress website builder or developer? If so you're likely working from one of two locations, home or an office. You might have tried out both in the past, or long for the one that you don't currently have. In this episode of the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast we debate the merits of one over the other and there's a surprising amount to say! Whether you're happy with your setup but have thought about changing, or if you just want to confirm your decision that your current location is the best... have a listen to the podcast and leave some comments...
Using WordPress and want to offer multiple languages? TranspatePress is a super simple, visual way to do that. Point, click, type, save, done! Easy as that. It's like a Page Builder for translations. You can translate anything on the page, post or ever WooCommerce products. There's a ton in the free version, but we also talk about the premium options which you can purchase too. It's a very mature offering and seems like a great WordPress translation solution. Check out the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast to find out more about it and how it works...
I don't do eCommerce! So when David suggested that we carry about a debate about WooCommerce v's other options, it was pretty clear which side of the fence I was going to defending! The opening of the podcast is about whether or not you should be involved with eCommerce at all. Yes, I know that lots of your clients want it, and there's decent money to be had from building such sites, but there's also the strain and stress that eCommerce websites bring that no others do. Upgrades can be problematic, restoring from a backup after something goes wrong, with orders still coming in is a nightmare, and it's likely the only kind of website that you're going to build which your clients are going to poking about in every single day - they break things and then, well, you know who they turn to for help! So just don't do eCommerce... period! David diagrees, so I ought to let him have his say too, so listen to the podcast to find out wht he thinks...
So today on the podcast we've got a new hosting provider for you, and that provider is 10Web. They are a platform that is hoping to take care of all of your WordPress needs. The idea is that you set up an account on their platform and then bring in sites that you've already created, or use their suite of tools to get you started. I'm seeing more services like this poppnig up all over the place... buy their service, log in, create a website with a Page Builder and have almost no idea that you're using WordPress at all. Go check out 10Web in the podcast this week.
We are talking about website hosting. Email hosting seems like a whole other debate, so we're going to avoid that altogther. This is just about hosting, and whether it is worth the hassle of getting your clients to have their hosting through you, or if it's better to just let them sort that out for yourself, leaving you to worry about building websites instead. There is money in them thar' hills though, so perhaps it's worth considering. Then again, it's a real pain the neck when things go wrong, and they will go wrong. So, what should you do, well, listen to the podcast of course!
So a couple of years ago the concept of WaaS (website as a service) started up, and we covered it quite a bit, we talked about WP Ultimo and did some live demos as well. The concept is simple, you create some templates for websites, most likely in a niche that you've identified, and you put them up for sale. People can come to your WaaS and they can get a site spun up that they can start using right away. Micheal Short saw this and decided that he could extend this, and so WaaS Pro was born. Micheal talks on the podcast about how his solution can greatly inprove your WaaS offering...
Today, the podcast about whether we should make use of lifetime deals or be happy to pay a recurring subscription for our WordPress plugins. We shall be mostly looking from the perspective of WordPress implementers. Folks like us who have clients who rely on us, who rely on developers to keep our site running smoothly… and to an extent move with the times. There's quite a few arguments in favour of both, which is quite surprising! It's not all about saving money and although it's great to get a good deal upfront, does this offer the developer of the plugin the financial security and motivation to keep development up to date and bug free? Anyway, lots to talk about so go have a listen.
Today we chat with Jason Resnick, a seasoned WordPress pro, who has been working with WordPress and eCommerce pretty much when it all started out! We're talking today about 'word of mouth' marketing. Now, most people when asked about word of mouth will probably see this as something that happens organically, something that you don't really have all that much control over. After all it's happening in situations largely outside of your control. You can offer a great service and hope that people are going to mention your name when they get asked the question... 'Who would you recommend to build my WordPress website?', but it's little more than hope, right? Jason explains why it's a little bit more than this in this weeks podcast...
This is the WordPress.org page builders i.e. Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, Oxygen, Brizy etc, against Wix, Weebly, Squarespace etc. In this debate we're talking about building a standard brochure sites that may need a blog or a shopping cart. So it's not about building out a complex, bespoke site that has masses of unique features. It's about something that's simple and can be done with the native features in the Page Builders. We debate the pros of using both types of page builders and learn some truths along the way...
Today is a little different from the episodes that we've been putting out of late. It's a story of one man and his journey with using WordPress. We talk today with David Decker. You might have seen him around the WP Builds Facebook Group from time to time, and if you haven't been in there you really should as he's one of the many friendly faces who are there offering helpful advice and expertise. I met David in on Facebook and was lucky enough to meet him in person at WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin. Was had a few chats and it became clear that an appearance on the podcast was going to happen...
There’s many types of businesses providing websites and marketing to many different client types. We have self-employed freelancers seeing it more as their vocation or as a side gig. Then we have large Agencies with teams of specialists, designers, UX experts, frontend and backend developers, project manager and a whole load more. Anyone who knows us we know we are really the former. Why the debate? Probably because there is a general wisdom that self employed people need to think of themselves as a business and that business are expected to grow. We are exploring whether this applies to those offering website services with WordPress. So, somewhat arbitrarily, David is going to argue from the point of view of growth, and I’m (Nathan) will argue that we can stay small. Check it out...
Trigger warning - this episode touches up on the subject of bereavement and so, you may want to bear that in mind before you listen. So today I'm talking with Albert Brückmann, the founder of EmergencyWP which is a WordPress plugin that you can use to protect your legacy, both online and offline. Think of EmergencyWP as a way of a silo of information that you would like to pass on to anyone in the event that you pass away. Albert created the EmergencyWP plugin, and the various iterations that went before it, as a result of an accident that occurred to a friend who had made insufficient preparations. It made Albert realise that the unexpected can happen and that having options to organise what and how your relations and friends receive might be something that you wish to be in control of.
To avoid things getting stale we decided to mix it up for a while and challenge ourselves by arbitrarily taking one side each in some of the great debates in WordPress. The idea is that it might make us dig harder in to topics, give us a focus and force us to look at other perspectives. So today we're tackling the WordPress debate of the moment 'Page Builders v The Block Editor (Gutenberg)'. With so much innovation in the Page Builder space is there any room for something similar in WordPress core? Do we like it? Do we use it? Do we see a future for it? Whatever your point of view, there's certainly a whole heap of arguments on either side of the debate, and honestly most of them are completely legitimate too! I'm sure that we're not going to change your mind about this, but we might come up with a few things that you'd not thought of before. I hope that you enjoy listening to it...
Want to learn about Advanced Custom Fields for WordPress? Join founder Elliot Condon as we talk about the plugin... past, present and future. We talk about what the plugin does and how it can transform the kind of sites that you're able to build. We then go on to chat about the last couple of years and how Elliot had had to put in a lot of work to make sure that ACF was ready for the 5.0 release of WordPress which brought in the Gutenberg editor. It was a period of huge learning and enormous uncertainty, but Elliot came through with flying colours. He managed to create ACF Blocks which is a non-coding way of creating your own bespoke Blocks that you can reuse within the editor. We also talk about the recent pricing changes - why an increase in price was long overdue and how it's going to support the plugin's development long into the future. Seriously nice guy... great episode...
This episode is all about trying to make some kind of impact... how you can actually get people to notice what it is that you're doing and make them want to care about it, enough perhaps to become your client. So for this people really need to know what it is that you do. Not for a myriad of things that you might be interested in doing, but the core things that you do well and that are profitable for your business. Alongside all of this is the need to have some kind of emotional impact as well, something that really resonates with your clients. We go into all of this in the podcast, so why don't you have a listen...
Today we stray into waters that we don't often swim in. We're talking about Agile development and launching a Minimal Viable Product, and the person I'm talking to is Marius Vetrici. Marius is a WordPress developer and runs an agency of twelve people... so he's got to have all his processes in place to ensure that his business is profitable and that his clients are happy. This discussion centres around a long post that Marius wrote entitles "Agile WordPress Development: How To Maximize The ROI Of Your MVP Website". In that post we learn that Marius had to learn to have processes in place because of a $200,000 project that just got out of hand. The product that he launched did not have the research done properly before the work started, and as such there was no real understanding of exactly what it was that they were trying to build. We talk about structuring work into sprints, how these sprints map to goals and how WordPress is the perfect tool to do all of this with minimal time and cost. Honestly... really interesting.
This episode is looking at who we think our idea WordPress clients might be and where we might find them. There's more to this subject than meets the eye! for a start, when are the people who we're trying to engage as clients actually receptive to our messages? It might not be at the times that you think are suitable. Perhaps they work late into the evening, or the team is dotted all over the globe? In terms of the who, this can be really hard - trying to work out exactly who we are going to target and therefore the kind of messages that they're likely to resonate with. Should we push towards word of mouth, or perhaps use social media channels to get some traction? What should those messages sound like, controversial, a debate, riding a common theme? It's all in the WP Builds podcast this week...
On the WP Builds WordPress Podcast today with have Patrick Gallagher from Gridpane. We talk about their mission to save you time and hassle when you build and host WordPress websites. They have a unique product which is being discussed a lot right now. We talk about how the company got started and how it is that they go the extra mile so that you don't have to. It's little things like not making you repeat work that you perhaps don't need to every time your set up a new site. Build a site, save it as a bundle then reuse it over and over again. Pretty much all you need to do it is to name the site, tell Gridpane where you want it to be hosted and click a button, that's literally it. Of course you can bring your own hardware like Digital Ocean, Linode, Google, Amazon etc, or point to an IP address of a box in your house! WordPress installs created, managed, backed up in the least time possible! Go check it out...
So many places to post your marketing messages and so many forms that they can take. What options are there and are any more useful than the others? We're taking another dive into the 'Watertight Marketing' book by Bryony Thomas, and exploring an area that neither David or I (Nathan) are particularly experienced at. We go over as many ways as we can think of for getting your (or your client) messages out there and think about what they might look or sound like. It's a surprisingly long list and it's changing all the time. What looked cool 3 years ago, might look foolish today and the platform of choice seems to change with alarming regularity! Have a listen to us chat this all through on the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast.
Creating content on your WordPress website that attracts people can be hard if you don't have a plan. Miles Beckler has a system to create content that people want to read. It's a simple system too. It might be something that you've implemented in the past, but it might be completely new to you. The approach is about creating content that you know that people are searching for, and for that you need a keyword tool (see the show notes).From there you write content that you are certain that people are actually going to want to read. You make it the best that you can, and you get better and faster at doing it. The beauty of this being held within WordPress is that it's going to be around for years to come and you can alter it should your data show that's it's in need of a tweak. You're not going to get rich over night, and that's not the point, but if you're willing to engage with Miles' process, you might find a new and interesting way to get paid. Fun listen...
You know how this goes... You have an inbox and it's overflowing. You have almost no time in the day to deal with nonsense, but you do read your emails... some of your emails. But which ones? Which emails make the cut and get opened and which ones fall by the wayside, their only purpose in life was just to add a tiny amount to the carbon footprint? Building WordPress websites, you need to advise your clients about ways that they can interact with their customers or audience. They need to have a little understanding in terms of how they can market to the world. Perhaps you're not the person to teach them all of this, and yes, there might be people out there who are heaps better at marketing than you are (this is certainly true for myself and David), but that should not stop you thinking about this subject and offer your clients some thoughts as to what might work, and certainly what does not work anymore. Check out the podcast to hear our thoughts on this...
Why should your WordPress website clients have any confidence in your ability to actually build and deploy their website? After all there are so many competitors to choose from. Is there any way that you can turn disbelief into belief? In another exploration of the 'Watertight Marketing' book we discuss this subject. Perhaps you've been using testimonials and turning them into case studies. These are easy to do, and no doubt quite effective, but how on earth do you actually get your clients to give up their precious time to provide then to you? Are you best just asking them directly or should you have them on some kind of 'website launch' sequence which guides them towards this? Are you going to tell them what to say or just leave it up to them, knowing that they'll miss out most of the things that you really need. It's a really difficult subject and one that both David and I feel that we need some help with!
Have you ever wanted to increase your email list? My guess is that in most cases, the answer is yes! It can be a hard thing to do though right? One way that's becoming popular is to offer some kind of prize(s) and raffle them off. The intention is to incentivise your audience to share the contest far and wide and create some kind of viral loop in which people keep coming back and adding new entrants to the contest through their (not your) endeavours. It's a simple but highly effective idea if the conditions are right... the prize, the audience, the perceived value etc. Many SaaS platforms exist to do these kind of contests, but RafflePress is different in that it's all happening in your WordPress website, and it's got a mighty set of features too! Join the founder of the plugin, John Turner, as we talk about how to use RafflePress and what makes it the unique.
What do you do when your WordPress website client says that they are talking to other people about the site that you're building... my girlfriend's nephew! How do we manage this? Do you just roll with the punches and assume that all will be well. Perhaps you need to ask who these people and what makes them qualified to offer their opinions. You could also put processes in place to make sure that the client has clear boundaries about who can suggest what. In this episode of the WP Builds WordPress podcast we talk this through. Guided by the Watertight Marketing book by Bryony Thomas. I'm sure that you've been through situations like this yourself, perhaps our ideas align with yours? Anyway, it's a fascinating subject which is the cause of so much wasted time and energy!
Who wants a hacked website. Anyone... anyone... Bueller! No? It's something that nobody wants, to wake up to discover that your WordPress website(s) have been breached and that unexpected things are now happening. Perhaps it's benign, but it might be serious. Data has been downloaded and you've got to spend time ameliorating the situation. Ryan Dewhurst is on the podcast today to chat through the WordPress security landscape. What people hack, what they gain and how the good guys are fighting back and trying to provide useful information to help us all stay safe. Ryan is behind WPScan, the WPScan Vulnerability Database and WPScan.io, all tools which enable you to stay up-to-date with the latest information about WordPress security. It's been a labour of love for a long time, and he's dedicated many, many hours so that you and I can sleep well at night. Great guy and a great episode...
How do your WordPress website clients 'try before they buy'? What can we do to trust our services and try them out before they part with their money. We share some ideas about that. Because, in the real world, we want to try out all-the-things before we buy them. Shoes, clothes, phones... most things. But was can't allow customers to try out the finished website before they are to sign the contract... we'd be broke. But perhaps there are some other ways that we can build up the trust that they need to have in us, ways that won't break the bank for us, but offer meaningful value to the clients and slowly, but surely edge them closer to the ultimate goal... the building of their new WordPress website. Join David and Nathan as they discuss what might be possible...
Some things are universal. Something about death and taxes. Another universal is that you will put some kind of contact form on every site that you build. You will though, won't you? WP Forms entered a crowded marketplace a few years ago with a simple idea... can we make it faster for users to create their forms, and I think that the answer is a yes! Join Jared Atchison, the founder of WP Forms, as we discuss what makes WP Forms different, how they got started, and where they are headed. Even if you're entirely happy with your current WordPress forms solution, this is still worth a listen to see how you can enter a saturated market, and still make an impact.
This discussion is another based on the book Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas which gives us 13 areas where we (or our clients) could be leaking potential business. With this series, we are working our way up an imaginary funnel starting first with our existing customers (Leak #1), then our on-boarding for leads (Leak #2) Now we are looking at Leak #3 – No emotional connection - Your brand or reputation – what kind of people are you? All of the elements above come together to really sum up what your company is about. It’s what will determine how it feels to be a customer of yours. It is what builds your company's reputation. This happens over time, but there are some foundations you need to lay. And those are what your company looks and sounds like.
Once in a while you attend an event and the speaker is so eloquent, so immersed in their talk, that you listen with an intensity that it out of the ordinary. Such was a talk given by the guest of the podcast today, Heather Burns. It was at WordCamp London in 2017, and I was in the audience. It was about online privacy, an area that she's an expert in. Today we discuss what online privacy actually is and how you need to be mindful about it as you build your WordPress websites. It's becoming more important year by year as we're now realising that we're often sacrificing our data and it might be used in ways that we're really not comfortable with. Join me as I discuss where you can make a difference and how WordPress is positioning itself with regards to privacy.
This is a little mini-series based upon the book 'Watertight Marketing' by Bryony Thomas. This is about that time in the client / project lifecycle when they (the client) have made some kind of commitment to use your products or services, they might even have signed a contract, but you've not delivered anything yet. It's a time when they can still 'get away' from you. Yes, you might have a contract in place whereby you can insist that they are obliged to give you this or that, but honestly, have you ever enforced this, or is it better to just let them walk away and save yourself the legal fees and headache of trying to get them to pay up what they owe you? David calls this 'The Welcome Window'. You think that you have them as a client, but it's still possible for things to go wrong...
WordPress is a huge community, and in that community there are people who need help and support. WP and UP is a charity that I'm involved with which offers that help. It's a truly great vision, but, as with all things it takes time and money to make it happen. Some of us at WP and UP decided to ride from Berlin to Portugal in 2020 to raise money for the charity. That's nice you say, what a jolly thing to to... erm... no. It's 3,000 km (nearly 2,000 miles) and it goes over a mountain range! In this episode I speak to my fellow riders, Dan Maby and Carole Olinger about why we're doing it, how we're doing it and why they don't appear to be scared as I am. Have a listen and perhaps even support the project?
This episode is really about keeping the WordPress clients that you already have. What's the old phrase? Don't leave money on the table? Well, that's certainly the case for many of us. This is another episode in our mini series and it's all about trying to get as much value from and to the clients that you already have. Perhaps you build sites and then just move on not making use of the rapport and connections that you've made. Surely though, our existing clients are the ones that know us and what we do best. They have trust in you and what you're able to offer. So today we explore what we've done to foster these client relationships and David has some great ideas about what he's doing with his own agency. Well worth a listen...
Today we have a chat with Brian Jackson from Kinsta. Kinsta are a managed WordPress hosting company who have grow rapidly since their inception in 2013. When they started managed WordPress hosting was not the giant business that it was today. In those days we were still opting for shared hosting and VPS hosting. But with the advent of cloud platforms such as Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud, there came an opportunity for people with the skills to leverage those platforms and repurpose them as WordPress specific hosting solutions. Find out how Kinsta works and see if they are a good fit for your next WordPress project.
This discussion is about marketing, and it has a very click-bait title! It’s probably safe to say that we are not experts in marketing and certainly not marketing funnels. Nevertheless we thought we would chat about this and why we might need to get better a digital marketing for ourselves and clients and where WordPress could help with that. What's different about this discussion is that really is an introduction to a series of discussions we will have based on a book called Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. Listen to this episode to find out more...
This is a little bit different. Today we talk to Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains about Spinup WP their new service which aims to make it trivially simple to get your WordPress website up and running on a cloud hosting provider - in fact just about anywhere. You login to their platform, fill out a few form fields and then go and grab a coffee. By the time that you're done your WordPress optimised server will be ready and just waiting to get WordPress installed on it. This all sounds so simple, but there is a very large amount of heavy lifting going on in the background, heavy lifting that you'd have to learn and do your self. If you've ever wanted to install WordPress on a cloud provider, then check this podcast out...
Do you think that you're a success as a WordPress professional? Have you got everything sorted out and working just how you like it? Perhaps yes, but possibly no! What exactly do we mean by failure? Is it a measure of how much we earn, the kind of work that we are able to do? Perhaps it's the amount of free time that our work allows us to have at our disposal. Failure is not so easy to pin down. Can we prevent it and plan ahead, put cash aside for a rainy day. Maybe failure is out of our control - the bad boss or the slowing economy. We chat through this whole topic and see what it is that we strive for and how we've approached these problems in the past.
What to know how a growing WordPress website agency manages their projects? Well this is the podcast for you. Today we hear from James and Martin Coates from Impact Media. They tell us about the tools that they use to make their agency as efficient as possible. Wireframes to video creation, image manipulation to automated testing we learn it all. We also chat about their preferred plugins for particular tasks. It's a great chat and will give you some insights into processes that, no doubt are part of your business, but perhaps you'll see a new way or a new tool that you might be able to use. Go have a listen on the WP Builds WordPress podcast...
Times have changed... It used to be that creating websites was really tedious. It took hours to get anything to go where you wanted it. Along came WordPress themes and life got a little easier, well sometimes, and then we got Page Builders with their rows and modules. Now you can get templates for just about anything and can have sites built in a matter of hours, but should we do it this way? Should we be using other people's templates or should we be doing all this from the group up? Perhaps there is a middle way? Tweaking what you find so that the internet does not all look the same! Join us to find out what we think...
If you create content you know that it's nice to be rewarded for that. The Like Coin is a Block Chain idea which might make this possible. People click a button, you get paid! The internet came along and suddenly everything was free, free news, free magazines, free books. But authors of content need to get paid and paywalls, donations are not working. What if you could click a button and pay someone, literally do nothing else... click a button. Like Coin is trying to build this...
So we all build websites. Perhaps we don't. Perhaps we're just involved with WordPress as a marketing expert, or a graphic designer. WordPress is useful to a whole slew of different job types which is great, but can also be a burden. What I mean by that is that there are so many hats that you can wear in the WordPress space, so many jobs that are needed to get a website up, running and maintained, that it can be hard to keep up. How do we do that...
You've been using a Page Builder to design your WordPress websites and life is great. But it could be better. The Page Builder Cloud plugin allows you to save your layouts to the cloud and reuse them on whatever website you want. So you can start to build your own library of layouts and they're right there, waiting to be deployed and save you a heap of time. The plugin is also going to be able to convert layouts from one Page Builder to another, but this is not ready just yet. Check it out...
This is the second episode about WordPress security. In this podcast we talk about the range of security plugins that we've heard of. It's by no means an exhaustive list, bit we cover some of the main options that you've heard of. We discuss these WordPress security plugins; what options do they offer, do we understand what they're doing and how do we pass on the responsibility for security to our WordPress website clients? Have a listen and post your comments...
This is the first in a two part podcast about WordPress and security. In this episode we go over all of the potential problems that you might encounter with your WordPress website. There's the usual things such as uptime monitoring, backups and implementing a firewall, but there's also some other, more unusual topics. Do you make sure that you're keeping your client data safe? Are you expunging backups and SSH keys that you no longer require in case your system is compromised...
If you've been using WordPress any length of time, you'll have run into the frustrations that the Media Library can present. It's a pretty decent UI, but it's not as good as services that we're using such as Google Drive or Dropbox. WP Media Manager aims to fix that. Not only does it look great but it stores all of your assets in Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure with all of the benefits that this brings... highly scalable, secure, permissions based. I think that this plugin is certainly worth a look... PS... Sorry about the poor audio this week!
Today, the podcast talks about tasks. Not so much the tasks themselves, but more the way that we approach them. We discuss the way that different people have the ability to move happily from task to task, whilst other people need to complete one task before they can move onto another one. I guess that there's no 'right' way to accomplish tasks, but it's interesting to see whether or not we think that other people's approaches are batter than our own. It's a fun episode for sure!
Today we learn about how how to make your WordPress website load as fast as possible. On the face of it, this is easy to do, but there's quite a lot going on when a website loads, and so there are many steps that you need to take a look at if you want to squeeze every ounce of speed out of it. Jan Koch talks us through the work that he's done trying to do all of that. There's likely some new content in here even if you're a seasoned optimiser, so stay tuned and I hope that you enjoy this episode.
In this episode David and I talk about the interactions which we have with clients. Most of the time (I hope) we have good relations with our clients. They want to work with you and you want to work with them... but this does not mean that you're always going to see eye to eye with them. From time to time you're going to have to face up to a client who is not wanting to work with your processes and it not willing to be flexible. What do we do...?
Have you ever wanted to get into paid ad campaigns using Facebook or Google, but did not know where start? This podcast episode explains how you can get started and what some of the pitfalls are. There's so much to learn that it's good to have an expert on hand and Daniel Daines-Hutt is that man. Get your content seen by more people whilst targeting those people who you really value thereby saving on your ad campaigns. Check out this episode to see how you can do that...
In this weeks episode of the WP Builds podcast we talk about the range of things that we consider when we buy a plugin or theme from a WordPress developer. It's clear that you need some level of trust in the product that is on offer, but how deep should that trust run? What are the things that you might want to be on the lookout for to establish some sort of trust score to make you feel confident in the purchase. Some of these are obvious and some are quite unexpected. Join us to find out...
In this episode of the WP Builds WordPress podcast we chat to Hahna Kane Latonick. She has a background as a software engineer but decided some time ago that what she really wanted to do was to help coders and developers to run their businesses more successfully. We all know that running a business is not the same thing as being a great developer and so Hahna is here to give you the guidance and support that you might need to both at the same time.
So this episode is a little bit of a departure for us, in that it's much more personal than usual, and has very little to do with WordPress, so forgive us! When we decided to cover this topic, I (Nathan) was thinking that we'd be talking about the things in life my non-work life that I have to do, sometimes in opposition to my work life.
If you've work with WordPress websites for client you'll know that one of the hardest parts of the job is successfully communicating with clients. Today, Hannah Smith talks about her approach for doing just that. It's a really interesting take on how you can try to keep your clients happy all the time, but that's realistically possible and there's going to be times when you need to push back and say "no". It's an interesting talk with some fresh perspectives in this important business area.
Have you ever thought about the fact that your personality has a direct impact upon how successful you are? Your personality type might make you better at some tasks that others and if you're building WordPress websites for your clients, it might also affect the way that you interact with them too, and have a real impact upon their success and failure. Join us as we discuss this topic; we're not experts and are just scratching the surface, but it's really interesting what we uncover.
If you're a Beaver Builder users then you'll know that there are some tasks that you have to perform over and over again when building a website for a client. It's perfectly okay, but Tom Carless thought that it would be better if there was a way to make repetitive tasks go away, so he built Beaver Team Pro. Want to update all those reds to green in one click, yes, want to make all specific button have an icon, yes! It's a great plugin that will save you (and your agency) heaps of time and money...
Do you struggle getting content from your clients when you're building them a WordPress website? Well, you're not alone. We all do. There are so many things that you need from them and so many ways that miscommunication can result. Even if your processes are battle hardened, chances are that they still tested from time to time. So how do you get images, copy and all the rest of it from your clients. Nathan and David discuss it, but don't expect any perfect solution from us...
Have you ever had a problem with your WordPress website that you could not figure out. Something appears to have been deleted, something suspicious appears to be happening but your cannot really be sure. WP Security Audit Log is a WordPress plugin that creates logs for just about everything on your site. It will enable you to work out exactly what went wrong and hopefully give you a let up in getting the site back up and running in the least time possible.
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 29th April 2019: WordPress Core WordPress 5.2 RC2 The Month in WordPress: April 2019 WPCampus’ Gutenberg Accessibility Audit Finds “Significant and Pervasive Accessibility Problems” Community WordCamp US 2019 Tickets Now on Sale Security Unauthenticated Media Deletion Vulnerability Patched In WooCommerce Checkout Manager Plugin Users Urged to…
Web design is dead. There's no doubt about it. The tools that we have now are so easy to use, there's literally zero barrier to entry. Within a week, you can a great website up and running even if you've never used the internet before. Mmm... You're the expert, these tools are only easy to you because you've worked hard at getting to know them. Then there's marketing, funnels, hosting updates. You know what, perhaps we're safe after all. This stuff is actually quite hard you know!
In this day and age where websites are collections of content in a database, there is no reason at all that this content cannot be translated into other languages and presented to people who speak those languages. In fact, I'd be able to make a fair compelling argument that it's a really good idea to translate your website into a variety of languages if there's a market outside of your first language to do so. WPML allows you to do that quickly and easily...
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 15th April 2019: WordPress Core WordPress 5.2 Beta 3 Gutenberg 5.5 Adds New Group Block for Nesting Child Blocks Community WordCamp Europe Publishes 2019 Speaker Lineup, Contributor Day Registration is Now Open WordCamp for Publishers is Coming to Columbus, OH, August 7-9, Call for Speakers Now…
In this episode David and I talk about the subject of pricing and in particular the thorny subject of putting prices up. We get started with a chat about what systems we use to actually receive payments from clients, PayPal, Stripe and good old fashioned bank transfers. We then move on to discuss what we've done in the past to up our rates. It turns out that maybe we need your help with this as there are so many areas where we're not sure what to do...
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 8th April 2019: WordPress Core WordPress 5.2 Beta 2 Gutenberg Team Publishes RFC Document on Widget-Block Interfaces Community WordSesh Returns May 22, 2019, Speaker Application Deadline is April 19 GoDaddy Acquires ThemeBeans, CoBlocks, Block Gallery, and Block Unit Tests Security SQL Injection in Advance Contact Form…
Joe has been in the WordPress space for years and years. Working as a freelancer at the start, then as a member of a large agency. All of that is now behind him and he's got a whole heap of different things that he's doing. He's a podcaster, a creator of videos for himself and for third parties, but perhaps most importantly he's a creator of online courses in the WordPress space. If you want to find out why he's so successful then listen to this episode...
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 1st April 2019: WordPress Core WordPress 5.2 to Make Gutenberg Block Editor Use Mandatory for All WordPress Sites“Since its initial release in WordPress 5.0, WordPress fans have used the new Gutenberg block editor to publish billions of posts on millions of websites. Third-party developers have also…
When you sell your WordPress websites to your clients, do you push the logical or the emotional? Do you talk about technical details or how easy and beautiful it will be? It's so easy to go down the route of the technical details, the SEO and caching that you'll put in place - this will all be good, but maybe your clients want to hear about cool it's going to look and how it's going to make people stop and marvel at the design. David has a problem and we try to solve it...
Do you post your content to multiple social platforms? If you do, I'm almost certain that this task is a little bit on the dull side. Is it isn't it? It takes time and is repetitive. Social Web Suite is a WordPress plugin that hooks into your social media accounts just waiting for your to publish something. As soon as you do, it gets to work making the social media posting nightmare evaporate - it does it all for you. Check it out.
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 18th March 2019: WordPress Core WordPress Ends Support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5, Bumps Minimum Required PHP Version to 5.6“WordPress has officially ended support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5 and bumped its minimum required PHP version to 5.6. The plan announced last December was to bump…
If you're a WordPress user then you've used heaps of plugins in the past. They enable WordPress to do anything don't they? That's WordPress' greatest strength and it's largest curse! There are so many to choose from, and all that choice leads to plugin fatigue. You never quite know if the plugin that you're using is 'the best' and so you're constantly on the look out for a newer, shinier plugin. The problem is that this cycle does not have an end...
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 11th March 2019: WordPress Core WordPress 5.1.1 Patches Critical Vulnerability“WordPress 5.1.1 was released yesterday evening with an important security update for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 5.1 and prior versions. The release post credited Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for discovering and reporting the…
Email marketing is usually the domain of expensive SaaS apps. Well, not any more. With the Groundhogg WordPress plugin you can automate all-the-things from inside your website! It's got lots of customisation options and works with a visual builder, just like the services that you're currently using. Adrian comes on to tell us about how it all got started and how the plugin works and what scenarios it might be useful for...
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 4th March 2019: WordPress Core Introducing the WordPress Triage Team“As WordPress has grown, the volume of tickets in Trac has naturally increased. While the number of open tickets on its own should never be the sole metric of software health, a large number of open tickets…
There are so many ways you can get paid for building WordPress websites, and if you've been in this industry for any length of time, then you've perhaps tried a few out? Do you charge on-off fees or use a model which judges the value that you add to the client's business? Perhaps you perfer to work on the basis that the website is an ongoing cost and the recurring revenue is really where you should be getting paid? We have no idea which is best, but it's fun chatting it all though...
It's all the rage isn't it? Set up an online course and teach the world about the things you know! You've seen the Facebook ads. You've sat down and thought about all the great content they you'll teach to your students, made some videos, created some handouts, even devised some tests that the students will have to complete to graduate. But then the daunting question arises... how do I actually get this online? Lifter LMS might be the answer...
WP Builds Newsletter #51 - WordPress 5.1 released, plugin updates and AI gets really scary
Do you glaze over when someone talks about internet security? Well, you're not alone - it's quite a difficult subject to understand. Thank heavens then that there's people like Oliver Sild who will understand it all for you. His company, WebARX has built a product which get all of your WordPress websites secured. They have one central dashboard which shows you all of the activity on your sites. Their firewall will drop suspicious traffic and keep you safe.
WP Builds Newsletter #50 - WordPress 5.1 RC, multiple vulnerabilities and AI gets scary
Are you the type of person who always does what your clients ask of you, or do you get angry with them? It's hardly a binary answer is it, but it certainly feels like it is sometimes! We've all been there... you've worked really hard on their WordPress website and you think that you've done everything right, but then the client comes back to you with a difficult email and your serenity is blown out of the water! What should you do...?
WP Builds Newsletter #49 - New Gutenberg blocks, Wordfence Central and DuckDuckGo rising
Adam has been on the podcast before, but on that occasion he was talking about his life as a freelancer, not as the owner of a SaaS app! He's founded a company called 'Split Hero' which is laser focussed upon one thing - split testing your WordPress website pages and gain meaningful data back about which one wins! Hang on a minute though... what is a 'split test'? Well, I'm glad you asked...
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...
WP Builds Newsletter #47 - WordPress 5.1, Gutenberg and Page Builder updates and new Google Search Console features
Phil Singleton is one of those guys who seems to do 15 things all at once, and doing them really well. His background, like many of us is not web design and development. He started in finance and insurance and hated it. Now he's an SEO specialist with a projects under his belt. We chat about the fact that SEO has changed over the years and what strategies you can employ with your WordPress website clients to ensure that their sites rank well, as well as being able to pitch SEO as one of your services.
WP Builds Newsletter #46 - Automattic announces Newspack, WordPress 5.1 feature and Gutenberg layouts
In this discussion episode with David and I, we discuss an idea called "The Magic Email". It's a really simple email that you can send to get something... anything back from a client who has gone AWOL. Simply, the email is designed to be deployed with the minimum of effort from you, but in return you'll get clarity if the email is replied to as well as if the email is not replied to! It's 17 words long and brings up some interesting points...
Today we have not one but two people on the podcast. Baptiste Debever and Francois Forest are WordPress plugin and theme developers based in France. During this podcast we discuss two of their products, a WordPress theme called WOffice and a SaaS app called Feedier. They both do completely different things, one is a WordPress intranet and the other is a feedback SaaS app... so let's get started...
WP Builds Newsletter #44 - WordPress marketing, image optimisation and a super detailed image
Happy New Year 2019! In this episode of the WP Builds WordPress podcast we take a bit of a look back at some of the things that we thought we important in 2018. Now I don't mean to imply that David and myself have any special insight here, it's just what occurred to us as important for 2018 and the way that we use WordPress. Some of this might not seem all that important to you, and undoubtedly we've missed a whole bunch of stuff out, but hey, you never came here for expertise did you!
Today we have an episode that deals with something very dear to my heart, writing blog posts - like this one! One of the problems that I have is that I write a post like this in WordPress and then publish it. It goes onto the website and I hope that people like you will read it and listen to the podcast episode. However, we're all busy people these days and it might be that you miss this post. I could roll over and accept that you've missed my wonderful content, or I could try to make sure that you see it at some point in the future. That's what Ben Dell's SaaS app, Missinglettr, does...
This episode is a little bit of a departure for us as it was inspired by the people in the WP Builds Facebook group (which you should join BTW). It is all based upon a in which David asked the simple question, "What's the one thing you love about building client websites?" Well, I think that both of us thought that this might get one or two comments, but in fact they poured in - 119 of them at the last count. It was really wonderful to read all of the varied things that you love about the work that we all do. We've got a lot to be grateful for, woking as we do building websites with WordPress.
WP Builds Newsletter #43 - Updates WordPress 5 already, PHP updates and social media is news
This week we have Mor Cohen on from Washington State in America and she's with us because she has a new course that she's launching called "The GeneratePress and Elementor Design Course". This course is designed for people like me, and when I say that it's unlikely that you need this course as much as I do because I have the design skills of a peanut! I can see what makes a design good, and I can appreciate a good design, but I cannot seem to be able to make a good design. That stuff is hard, or so I thought. Mor thinks otherwise!
WP Builds Newsletter #42 - WordPress 5.0 is out, nobody dies and Google stepping into WordPress
This is a little bit of a departure for us today because we take a deep dive into the life of our guest - Rebecca Gill. Typically on the podcast we chat about plugins and themes and talk to developers about their ideas and their code. Not today, well not just that today! Today we listen to the story of how life has shaped Rebecca, and I can tell you that so much has happened to her that it's amazing that she's still able to get up in the morning. Many people faced with a poor start never recover from it, but others seem to be able to rise above it, they have a tenacity that enables them to keep going, to take charge of their own destiny and to flourish. Rebecca chose to flourish. Find out how...
WP Builds Newsletter #41 - WordPress 5.0 RC2, Plugin vulnerabilities and FBI takes down ad fraud network
We talk to Paul Lacey and discuss with him what UI is. Both David and I work as independent freelancers and this means that we have a process that has worked for us over time. Paul however is part of a growing agency called DickieBirds and this means that he has to think about all this more than we do. It's a wide ranging discussion which might resonate with you if you are working with WordPress to create client sites. We know that other people who are really successful follow a whole bunch of processes which makes their life easier. I don't, but Paul does, so listen in...
WP Builds Newsletter #40 - WordPress Release Candidate 5.0, new blocks creator and VSCode course
This week on the podcast we have a man that I have no doubt that you've seen before? He's got a very popular YouTube channel called WP Crafter. It's a channel in which Adam creates videos explaining how WordPress plugins and themes work. It's really popular, like really popular. Okay so that's why you've heard of him, but it's not why he's on the podcast today. The reason that he's on is because of a new and interesting plugin that he's selling called CartFlows which is going to change the way that you do eCommerce. Find out more...
WP Builds Newsletter #39 - WordPress 5.0 beta 5, GDPR plugin hack and comments in Google SERPs
We all have things in our lives that we want to quit, but we're limiting this conversation to your work as a WordPress professional and the moments in the day when you start to do things that you know that you shouldn't! Perhaps it's too much Facebook. You've set up email notifications to appear, and appear they do, with alarming regularity. Several time an hour you get pinged and go to read what you hope will be something of weight and importance. We're all guilty of it, as Mark Zuckerberg's accountant can testify. Or perhaps it's trying to keep up with the latest trends, or time wasting, or office hour or podcasting!
WP Builds Newsletter #38 - WordPress 5.0 update delayed, multiple security concerns and do you earn enough?
Today we welcome Matt Mullenweg on to the WP Builds podcast. Matt has been using WordPress as long as anyone else, with one exception! He is the co-founder of WordPress along with Mike Little, so he knows a thing or two. We talk about Gutenberg, why Matt thinks that we need it, and why we need it now. We go on to chat about how it's divided the WordPress community, especially from the perspective of users with accessibility needs. We finish with a discussion about how the community can reunite after this 'schism' and what Matt thinks of the recent ClassicPress fork of WordPress.
WP Builds Newsletter #37 - Gutenberg accessibility updates, PHP 5 dead and Red Hat bought
In this LIVE Webinar we celebrate the 100th episode of the WP Builds podcast! It was a bit of a technological disaster! David Waumsley and I both got kicked out of the webinar before it had started and then we in a webinar all alone for 28 minutes as the webinar tech support worked out what went wrong. Jim and David McCan held the fort until we returned - very cool! We discussed what we think are the things that will happen in WordPress over the next two years or so. It's a bit of a ramble, but I can promise you that next week we'll be back to normal!!! Who'd have thought that we'd get this far? Who cares that we did anyway! Thanks for sticking with us!
WP Builds Newsletter #36 - WordPress 5.0 Beta, getting bored with WordPress and video news
Today, we get to meet Laura Elizabeth. She’s a designer turned plugin creator that has some good ideas for you! Like I say, she’s a designer and her latest product, Client Portal, is a great way to help you and your clients to stay on the same page. If you build WordPress websites for clients, then I think that you’ll know this problem… you get out of sync with your clients and all the communication seems to go all over the place. Some people want you to send them email, others would rather that you use Slack or Dropbox or Google Drive or some other system that you’ve never heard of! The long and the short of it is that you’ve got many clients all needing you to communicate with them in a variety of ways and Client Portal makes that process much easier!
WP Builds Newsletter #35 - Twenty Nineteen close, accessibility concerns and a super fast camera
There are some people that you're drawn towards aren't there? People that you like to listen to, people that you like to read about. When I started to use WordPress a few years ago, I was constantly on the lookout for people who were producing great content that I could consume to further my understanding of how WordPress worked and of how I could make it do what I wanted it to do.I'm sure that you have your list of people who fill this criteria, the people that you want to listen to and read about? Carrie Dils is one of those people for me. She's be creating content in the WordPress space for ages and not just that, she's been producing a whole load of different forms of content.
WP Builds Newsletter #34 - Help needed with Gutenberg, Elementor adds Cusomt Fields integrations and DuckDuckGo on the rise
I don't know you, but I know for an absolute fact that I'm hopeless at marketing. I'm not very good at it and it find it really hard to do, or to get excited about. It's a something that I've struggled with for a long time. I'm lucky in that I have enough work (right now) to keep me going and it comes my way largely through word of mouth. Because I'm a study in mediocrity, this is fine by me; I have not needed to market too much to keep my head above the water. But I'm hoping that you're not as satisfied with mediocre, as I am - you're a get-up-and-got type aren't you? You want more out of life than I do? Well guess what, you're going to have to market yourself in order to get, because you can be sure that competitors will.
WP Builds Newsletter #33 - Gutenberg release date, WordCamp Europe and Google pay Apple a lot of dollars
If you’re a regular listener to the podcast then you’ll know that I was once a heavy user of Drupal. The reason for this is simple, Drupal is really rather awesome. I know that this is a WordPress podcast, but there’s just no denying it; Drupal does heaps and heaps of stuff really well, and dare I say it… sometimes better than WordPress does! Okay, now you can put those pitchforks away, ‘cos I’m not trying to convert you over to Drupal, because, after all, I left and don’t use it anymore. Drupal has a module (aka plugin) called Views, and I’m not exaggerating to say that it’s very very very cool indeed. When I came to WordPress, I could not understand why there was nothing like Views. Something that you could point, and click at and get data out. Until I discovered Query Wrangler by Jonathan Daggerhart...
In this episode, we return to the ‘good old days’ in which David and myself just used to drone on and on! We decided that we had not done nearly enough droning recently, and so… I give you episode 95! We go over our thoughts about how we cope when a client asks us to do something that is completely new to us. I’m guessing that we’ve all been in that meeting, or been on that call when you realise that the client is asking for something that you don’t know that you can pull out of that WordPress hat that you’ve been wearing. Perhaps it’s something that you know can be done, but you know that you’re not able to do it. Or maybe it’s something that you simply cannot understand and don’t even know where to start.
WP Builds Newsletter #31 - Gutenberg Cloud, WPForms buys forms plugin and robots on asteriods
I've often pondered the idea of setting up some kind of SaaS product, something that I could build and then turn it over to the public and they would be able to purchase it from me on a monthly basis. I think that when people do this with WordPress it's called WaaS. Is that right? Well, one of the things that I've always wanted to do was to set up a system where clients could sign up to a monthly / annual website plan, pick a theme that they liked, pay and it would all be automated - done for them (and me) as if by magic. Arindo Duque has built such a thing and, honestly, it's a little gem that you ought to explore if this idea has ever tempted you too.
WP Builds Newsletter #30 - WordPress 4.9.9, Gutenberg updates and the world's oldest cheese
I’m not that keen on writing. It’s one of the things that we all have to do, but it’s not my greatest strength as you can tell if you are reading this. What I dislike more than just writing though is writing proposals for prospective clients. I don’t like it because I’m not very good at getting my points across all that succinctly and I find it hard to get into the ‘style’ that I need to adopt to make it have a fighting chance of being read and accepted. Well, don’t you love living in the age of the internet where there is an online service for just about everything that you could possibly need in life? Adam Hempenstall discovered that there were people like me all over the planet; people who needed to hand writing their proposals.
WP Builds Newsletter #29 - New vunerabilites, Drupal Elementor and significant Chrome updates
We have a 'special guest' called Paul Lacey from Dickie Birds to discuss the always relevant subject of pricing, and more specifically do better paying clients mean 'better' clients? We all know that the answer is, annoyingly, sometimes, it all depends and maybe! Ha! There's no guarantee that, just because someone has deep pockets, they are going to fun to work with. Sometimes the fact that a client is paying more for your WordPress products and services means that you have more 'bandwidth' to absorb the many problems that arise during your website build, but equally, clients that have very tight budgets can be very demanding of your time and have expectations far above what their wallet will realistically allow!
WP Builds Newsletter #28 - Long live the Classic Editor, Gutenberg updates and AI taking our jobs
Right, so we know that WordPress is pretty cool don't we? Glad that we got that straight. It does heaps of things really, really well, but honestly, it's got limitations! That's why we have plugins! A few years ago I needed to build a site for an estate agent (realtor for you folk over in North America I think). This site needed the ability to show a list of properties on the market, but the client wanted the users of the site to be able to filter the list of properties so that only the ones that matched their criteria were shown to them. So... houses under £300k, with a garage.... Well, trying to pull that off in WordPress is jolly hard, but thankfully Matt Gibbs got there before you! He's created a plugin called Facet WP which is the answer to all your filtering prayers (you do have filtering prayers don't you)!
WP Builds Newsletter #27 - ClassicPress fork, multisite media library and cPanel acquired
This week we have Eric Debelak on the podcast talking about... what else... Gutenberg! Eric is a bit of a fan of Gutenberg. So much so in fact that he's spent quite a bit of time working on a project specifically for Gutenberg. It's called WPBlocks.Party! Seeing as how the WordPress community is full of clever people, those same clever people (like Eric) decided that it would be very nice to have more than just the standard set of blocks that Gutenberg comes with. We need more than just text and images and videos in a modern platform don't we?
I'm not very good in the real world! Get me away from my little office and my screens and I'm all 'out-at-sea'! I have to suddenly communicate with people and interact; I cannot click a button and get an expected response from other people. People, unlike code, are just so darn unpredictable. They do what they want and have hidden thoughts and expectations. If you've been building websites for clients for any length of time, you'll know that your clients can be your best friend and your worse nightmare. They want things they didn't communicate to you. So it goes! Erin Flynn is here to help you sort this mess out.
WP Builds Newsletter #25 - Gutenberg updates, ACF blocks update and Drupal gets Gutenberg
I really like it when you talk to someone that has done a variety of things in the internet / WordPress space. Daniel Olson is a man that fits that description, as you're about to find out! He's got a whole heap of fin stuff going on which we talk about in depth, but the 'long story short' is that he's an AWS (Amazon Web Services) expert. If you did not know, AWS is the ridiculously large suite of tools that Amazon has built to make anything possible on the internet. Daniel leverages all that AWS goodness to build products that you might want to use for your WordPress business. For a start he has not one, but two hosting products that you might want to check out, Aminoto and Shifter...
WP Builds Newsletter #24 - Gutenberg news bonanza, good things from Envato and a free image repo!
If you listen to this podcast with any regularity then you'll know that I'm (Nathan) a sucker for a new app. Mostly I hear about a new app, signup for a trial and play with it for a few days. Sometimes, although rarely, I continue to use the app and pay for it. Such is the case with Plutio. It's a SaaS app that I've been using for a few months now because I just like it so much. I also like the founder, Leo Bassam, the guest on this week's podcast. I like the app because it replaces quite a few apps that I was using in the past, and I like Leo because he's just so positive about Plutio. The app does tasks, invoices, proposals, timesheets, client management and more. Go check it out...
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! 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. 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. Listen to find out more...
We've all had that dream... Create a platform that you can set free unto the world. A platform that will allow you to gather new customers who would like to use your product, even though they've never talked to you before. A platform that will automate all the things so that you can sit on a beach drinking expensive cocktails and... erm... you get the (somewhat exaggerated) idea! Seriously though. How many times have you thought about leveraging WordPress so that it could be used a platform that could automate your website building business? I know that I have. Unlike you and I, Matthew Rodela stuck at it and has managed to create a business which pretty much automates the creation of websites and his customer base. He's leveraging that well known but under explored feature of WordPress - Multisite.
WP Builds Newsletter #21 - Gutenberg madness; disable it, theme it and finally send android messages from your PC
We do have some cool guests on this podcast don't we? Yes we do, and this week is no different. It's not about a plugin or a theme, or how to run your business. No... this is about philanthropy and doing nice things for people who need nice things to be done for them. It's about 48in48.org. Adam Walker is the man behind it all and so he's on to tell you about it and hopefully get you involved. The idea is really very simple... there's a whole load of deserving people out there who are trying to be good. They do good things with their time and make the world a better place. Sadly though, many of these good things don't make a lot of money and so they cannot afford to have websites built for them. Adam thought, I should try to solve that, and solve it he did!
Brizy Page Builder... This episode feels like it's timed at right moment because, if like me, you are always hunting around WordPress communities for news, then you cannot have failed to hear about the new Page Builder on the block - Brizy. We've become used to Page Builders now haven't we? Well, many of us have anyway! They cut a huge amount of time and effort out of creating pages in your WordPress site and they're also getting more and more capable of taking on the task of creating headers, footers, archive pages. In short, they're getting too sophisticated to ignore. There are a bunch of Page Builders that we know and love, so why should the Brizy developers have launched into a market that already has some major incumbent players? Why indeed?
WP Builds Newsletter #19 - Acquisitions madness, flaw in WordPress Core and loads of Google stuff
One of the best things about doing this podcast is getting to meet people that I might not otherwise have had the chance to talk to. Often those people are doing amazing things in the WordPress space. Dan Maby is one such person. He’s doing really amazing things, and I loved chatting with him. Dan appears to be on a mission to set up WordPress meetups all over the UK, and this is no trivial task. Dan however runs many of them, all over the UK. So what might have been a part-time job suddenly becomes multiple full-time jobs. I honestly don’t know where he gets all the energy and enthusiasm from.
This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 18th June 2018: Matt Mullenweg Unveils Gutenberg Roadmap at WCEU, WordPress Agencies and Product Developers Sprint to PrepareLast week I mentioned the fact that Matt Mullenweg had spoken about Gutenberg at WCEU. What I forgot to mention was the timeline that he spelled out. I’m not…
This week on the podcast we talk about something that is very dear to my heart… WordPress security! I have literally no idea why this subject fascinates me as much as it does, but for some reason, I cannot help myself, I just love it! I am interested in WordPress / internet security from the 10,000 mile high perspective. I’m not the kind of person to delve into the math of Elliptic Curves or Diffie Helmann symmetric keys. You need to be clever to actually understand this stuff, and as we all know, cleverness is not something that I possess too much of! David Hayes on the other hand is a clever person; the kind of man who understands the code behind WordPress security.
WP Builds Newsletter #17 - State of the Word Address, Gutenberg Ramp and a spying football app
Ever heard of Gutenberg? Nah, nobody in the WordPress community has mentioned it at all this year have they?! It's the most talked about thing in WordPress right now, and for good reason. When WordPress 5.0 ships at some point in 2018, Gutenberg will be along for the ride too, and it's going to change WordPress in a pretty significant way. Now, I'm not too sure exactly what it will look like and exactly how it will behave, because it's going through some serious iterations at the moment. It's come a really, really long way over the past year and recent updates have seen it change even more quickly.
WP Builds Newsletter #16 - WordPress in 7kb, malware eating malware and an underwater datacenter
I really like Zac Gordon. He's one of those effervescent people who just exude warmth and thoughtfulness. I recently watched his talk at WordCamp London 2018 and he was such a great public speaker; able to chat to the room and not talk at them. His talk was about Gutenberg... because, well, you know... it's coming! He really knows his stuff too! What's that saying...? "If you can teach someone a subject, it shows that you really understand it", well, something like that anyway! Zac has been in the WordPress education space for years, teaching many, many people the in's and out's of WordPress. He's worked for companies like Treehouse as well as offering courses which he manages himself. Courses like his "Learn Vanilla JavaScript Deeply Course", and The "Gutenberg Development Course", there's so much great content that he's produced over the years.
WP Builds Newsletter #15 - Massive Gutenberg tutorials, Yoast ruins SEO and the end of tablets
Quite a while ago now, we had a chat with Amir Helzer, the CEO of onTheGoSystems, the people behind the popular WPML and Toolset plugins. Well, time and tide wait for no website, and developers need to keep innovating and updating their products to keep them relevant. Amir is on the show this week to chat through some of the important updates that they've been busy with. We talk quite a lot about some great new features that have been added to Toolset, such as the ability to create complex relationships for your WordPress Custom Post Types. He tells us what relationships are, and why you might want them.
WP Builds Newsletter #14 - WordPress is 15, WP 4.9.6 updates anyone and Google is now "evil"
I don’t know much about design. I’m one of those people who knows what they like when they see it. So I’m basically your worst client! Luckily there are people out there who do understand design. They think about it deeply and understand why some combinations of colours and shapes work well (good designers) and others don’t (me and turnips). Piccia Neri is one such person; she’s good at design and understanding design. Coming from a background in art history she moved over to the web and has been applying her knowledge to web design ever since.
WP Builds Newsletter #13 - WordPress major update? Hacking / Cryptomining and Google warnings
In this episode we get to chat to Sujay Pawar, somewhat of a rising star of the WordPress world. I think that it’s quite likely that you’ve heard of some of the products that his company (Brainstorm Force) have created over the years. Shall I just list them out for you, so that you can say, “Yes, I’ve heard of those,” at the end? The Astra Theme, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Convert Pro, Schema Pro, WP Portfolio and actually there were a few more along the way too! There, I told you that you’d heard of them! Is that enough for you!? Listen to the episode to find out more.
WP Builds Newsletter #12 - Free SEO course from Yoast, GDPR compliance and SEO renaissance
You discovered WordPress a while back and you thought, "this is great, but I need more fields". Admit it, that's exactly what you said isn't it? Well Elliot Condon heard your cry and went out and built ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) for you. It's about the most useful thing that you could add to WordPress other than, say, the Pro version of ACF, which is even better! You get heaps of new fields to play with and turn WordPress into something that is more CMS than blog platform! We find out all about ACF; it's past, present and future, and we also find out about Elliot and what kind of a nice chap he is.
WP Builds Newsletter #11 - WordPress turns 15, Trusted Authors Program and WordPress Hacked by a Child
Way back in September 2017, we did an episode called "Build it out of love. The morality of GPL licenses". In this episode David an I (as is our custom) spoke at great length with almost zero understand of the subject matter. I'm happy to say that most of you just tut and move on, but one or two of you are really, really listening and decide to question our proclamations! Jonathan Bossenger is such a person and he was having none of it! He decided that you guys actually needed to know real facts about The GPL and so he got in touch. You of course understand that I'm joking? He was very nice and thoughtful and considerate; which is more than we deserve!
This week we have Daniel David on the show talking about his plugin, Smart Slider 3. If you have not used a slider on any of your WordPress website projects, then it might be time to have another look, because, these things are pretty amazing these days. Smart Slider 3 does not just slide things in from one side of the screen to the other in fun ways, oh my goodness no, it does a whole lot more than that! Smart Slider 3 is a drag and drop slider builder that you can use in many, many ways; some of them unexpectedly cool. Think Page Builder for only sliders!
WP Builds Newsletter #9 - Gutenberg 'off', dead page builder and Chrome stops annoying videos
On the podcast today we’ve got Claudio Benvenuti from HardyPress, a company who do hosting your WordPress site a little differently. The normal hosting environment for WordPress usually involves a LAMP stack of some kind and that’s about it. It’s more complex as that as we all know, but that’s your basic level and it goes up from there. The amount of money that you spend buys you things like more bandwidth in a month, more hard disk space, and a better CPU. You might even invest in a managed WordPress host that does some serious work caching all the things to make it faster.
WP Builds Newsletter #8 - Elementor updates / API, WooCommerce loves GDPR and Theme Review Changes
Let me introduce you to Bob Dunn (a.k.a. BobWP), ha, like that’s a sentence that you’re going to be able to say! We all know about Bob don’t we? We’ve read his many blogs and listened to his many podcasts and he’s taught us all a great deal. So this one was a great one for me to do as I have a huge amount of respect for Bob and all that he does for WordPress. What, I think, makes Bob unique is the sheer amount of quality content that he produces, it’s prodigious and it’s hard to know how he manages to create it all.
WP Builds Newsletter #7 - Gutenberg, JetPack, WP Rocket updated and there's a tiny camera
The SaaS app that you use on the WP Builds website to enter the competitions is called Viral Loops and today we have Savvas Zortikis on to speak about it.The idea behind viral marketing is that you offer something that people want and you ask them for their email in return. Well, that's all pretty standard stuff that we've all known about since 1995! The word 'viral' is used here because of the fact that your entrants are encouraged to share your offer because if they do, they increase their own chance of winning. The more you share, the more you're likely to walk away with the prize.
WP Builds Newsletter #6 - It's all numbers - PHP 7, WordPress 4.9.5, BuddyPress 10, Elementor 2
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast we get to talk to a very generous man! He's called Barna Buxbaum and he's the man behind the wildly popular template pack for the Elementor Page Builder called Katka. I'm always astonished by how people produce amazing things in the WordPress space and then just give them away for nothing! How cool is that? Barna's Katka is a huge library of over 170 (yes 170!) design elements that you simply download and drag and drop into your page designs. There's something for everyone, from 'Calls to Action' to 'Testimonials', 'Pricing Tables' to 'FAQs'.
On the podcast this week we have not one, but two guests! They've come on to talk about the work that they've been doing to keep the amazingly popular WordPress theme GeneratePress up to date and relevant. Those two people are Tom Usborne, the lead developer from GeneratePress, and Paul Lacey, a long time user of the theme who runs , a WordPress agency based in the UK. Tom thought that it was time to add a new feature called "GeneratePress Sites" and it will allow you chose from a range of pre-designed sites, click a button and import those site's designs and pages.
Two for the price of one! That's what this episode feels like, because not only do I get to interview Clark Marshall from Blue Dog Digital, but I also get to interview our very own David Waumsley, AT THE SAME TIME! The reason that we have them both on the show is that both Clark and David have made some very important decisions about how they would like their lives to pan out. They decided to become 'Digital Nomads'. This, to me, evokes thoughts of great pioneers; people who are brave enough to reject the 9-to-5 lifestyles that most of us moan about, but put up with.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast we chat to Pia Silva from badassyourbrand.com. She's a New Yorker with a whole load of energy and is a lady on a mission to "Bad Ass Your Brand". It's the title of her book as well as her philosophy to create a brand for your company. It's definitely not about just growing your agency; more staff, more contracts more... everything. It's about cutting things out of your business and making it very specifically the place that you want to work. It's about trying to do less work, to get paid more and have a little more time off.
This week we chat to the man who in the world of WordPress needs no introduction... Troy Dean. He's become an important figure in our community and is a great podcast guest who has a lot of great advice. Of course, you'll know about Troy from his very successful projects such as WP Elevation and Rock Star Empires. His courses have inspired many people (me included) to really take a long look at their WordPress businesses and think about how they could become more profitable. He's a great speaker, with that rare ability to speak at great length and be authoritative at the same time.
In this episode we are joined for the second time by Mike Killen who runs Sell Your Service. Last time he was on the WP Builds podcast, he talked about how to create funnels to assist you with your marketing goals. He made the process seem to simple! Well, I think that his experience on the podcast went to his head, because soon after we'd ended the call we started to talk about his new idea - Beaver Funnels. This is his game changing plugin that allows you to leverage the awesomeness of the Beaver Builder Page Builder and use it to create point and click funnels.
So many of you are now using a Page Builder, admit it! Honestly, why wouldn't you, they are such a great way to cut hours of time out of the development process of your WordPress web site. Well, I'm sure that you've heard of Beaver Builder, one of the Page Builders that you really ought to be using. I could go into all the reasons, but suffice to say that it's polished, reliable, and as stable as a thing which holds horses! Recently the guys over at Beaver Builder released version 2.0 into the wild and Robby McCullough is here to explain all about it.
Let's be clear, this is a great story about something that we'd all like to happen to us! So you're a developer and you come up with an idea that you decide you should build. You really don't think about whether or not there is a target market and how many potential customers you're going to have, you just build it because you have the ability to do it. Then, one day, more or less by chance you meet a bunch of people who just happen to know other people who have the ability to make your product a success for you. It's the stuff of dreams.
It seems that Eric is one of those people who is always creating new things. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, I really do mean that every couple of months he's trying his hand at something new! Lucky for us, Eric is really rather good at actually delivering new things that are well made and useful, and Instant IDE is no exception. It's new, but is already a pretty robust product, with autocomplete, tree style directory navigation, colour preferences, in fact pretty much all you could want.
Since the dawn of the internet, it was pretty obvious that if you wanted to do anything other than look at "stuff that other people had put there", you were going to need forms. You can submit things to a web site and they can then parse that data, do fun things to it and then present it to you in a different way. So now there are forms everywhere! Mark Sinclair explains why SparkChart is a powerhouse survey tool for you and your clients.
The Elementor folk are thinking about the future and how the product is going to evolve over the coming year. The obvious question is how Elementor is going to align with Gutenberg which is now only a few months away. Are Gutenberg and Elementor in opposition or are they going to work in harmony together? What are the plans to introduce an Elementor Theme Builder, and will it be a new product, or an upgrade to the Pro version of the current product? Also, what’s going on in the longer term?
Well, this is going to be a nice treat for all of you folk that like a Page Builder, especially if that Page builder is called Elementor! Elementor has been growing in popularity during 2017 and has established itself as a solid platform with a reputation for being easy to use with a very generous free version. Ben joins us in Part 1 to tell us about how Elementor got to be where it is today. Who worked on it, how did they decide what to include and what to leave out. Well worth a listen.
In this episode we get to meet Bradley Kirby who has a very cool little plugin for Beaver Builder called Wallace Inline. It's really rather cool, and allows you to update the contents of your Beaver Builder pages without actually using the Beaver Builder dialogue boxes. If you've never used Beaver Builder then you need to know that when you edit content on your page, a little box opens up with all the settings for that 'module'. This plugin changes that and makes editing even more easy!
Last week we introduced you to Regina Tuzzolino and her remarkable approach to writing copy. Well, in this, the second part of the interview, Regina unpacks the ways that this method can be applied to web site copy. It’s such an innovative way to tackle what many of us don’t really like doing. Not only do we not have the required skills, but we’re often more focussed upon the way that a site looks and less upon the impact of the language that we use.
So web copy is hard to do. Some of you might be experts, but most of us are not! We struggle to find a way to make copy that is engaging and innovative; something that people will want to read. Regina has a wonderful take on how to create successful copy through her step-by-step process. It's called the 'Hero's Journey', a 12 step method of breaking down ideas into something meaningful which will resonate well with people.
In the episode we talk to Edmund Turbin about WP Engine and why you might consider it if you're in the game for a hosting provider. I'm sure that you've heard of WP Engine before, but if you haven't, they're a WordPress specific host who do WordPress and nothing else. They have been experiencing amazing growth since they were founded, and it says a lot about the WordPress ecosystem that services such as this can thrive.
Discussion - David and Nathan discuss whether or not it's a good idea to automatically update your plugins. Interview - How to get paid more with Brent Weaver - Part 2. Last week we were introduced to Brent Weaver from uGurus. We learned about his business and how he aims to assist businesses achieve higher fees and become more profitable. This week is a little different, because we're delving more into Brent (the man) and not Brent (the business man)! Does that make sense?
In this episode of the podcast we talk to Brent Weaver from uGurus. He's an exceptionally thoughtful mentor for people who would like to see an upturn in their web design business. uGurus has been going for many years and has helped loads of agencies both big and small to increase their fees. I guess that there is no magic sauce for this kind of thing, but what you'll be gaining is the combined experience of people who have struggled through this problem before.
In this episode we talk a lot at the beginning about the fact that we're going to be making some changes to the podcast over the coming weeks. We also talk about what processes we follow when we work. In the light of all the tools that we have available to us these days, what we do / use to get a site from proposal to completion. Now, we're not saying that you should follow what we do, as we know that it's likely hopeless, but we're telling you anyway so that you can tear us down and make us feel inadequate!
This week we chat to Chris Mason, the founder of a few plugins which extend WooCommerce. Making sales on the internet can be hard, and it’s made more difficult if the checkout process is not optimised as much as possible. If you run a WooCommerce store then you’ll know that the checkout process, whilst perfectly okay, doesn't really allow you to upsell items. Well, WooCurve aims to make that a reality.
So you’ve heard of Matt Medeiros before, you know that you have. He’s the guy that does The Matt Report, a podcast that delivers great content to business owners who are using WordPress. He’s all over the internet all the time, writing great articles and making useful videos teaching people how to use WordPress. He’s full of energy in a way that most of us could only dream of! Great episode from start to finish!
In this episode of the WP Builds we talk to the one and only Lee Jackson. If you’ve not heard of Lee before, then, frankly, it’s high time that you did! In fact, if you’ve not heard of Lee, I wonder if you should get your eyes or ears tested, because he’s making so much content it’s like he’s actually part of the internet itself! He makes a great podcast, runs a successful agency, makes lots of video content. I wonder if he sleeps?
If you’ve been using the internet lately (ha!), you’ll know that people use it to buy and sell things! Wow, amazing! Turns out that taking payments online is a seriously difficult thing to do, difficult that is to write the secure code that will ensure that transactions processed properly. Phil has built a WordPress plugin that allows you to really easily get up and running with Stripe payments.
Today we have Kim Doyal, aka The WordPress Chick, on the podcast. I don’t think that it’s entirely possible that you’ve not heard of her before if you’ve been in the WordPress space for any length of time! She a powerhouse of energy and enthusiasm and has been pushing put content at a breathtaking rate day after day, year after year. Does she ever sleep, no! Is she great, YES!
Today we talk Gin McInneny, an Aussie who is well worth listening to. I’m sure that you’ll have heard of some of the projects that she’s working on. Gin is a central person in the running of WP Elevation, a community of WordPress professionals; making sure that their WordPress businesses are super effective.
Today we’ve got Craig Hewitt on from Seriously Simple Podcasting. Now this is something that I can really relate to, and if you have (or have ambitions to have) a podcast, then this is going to be worth listening to. Seriously Simple Podcasting makes podcasting, erm… seriously simple! It’s not a joke it really does. Lovely show!
This week we get to meet the man behind the Beaver Builder Facebook group - Dave Toomey. Many of you will know that there is a 8,000 strong group out there, but perhaps you didn’t know that it was not started by the folk over at Beaver Builder, but by a lone Irish fella called Dave Toomey. Turns out that running a large Facebook group involves quite a bit of work.
In this episode Nathan and David talk about GPL (General Public License). This is the license that allowed the work that was done webblog tool B2 to be used to make WordPress. It’s the licence that allowed WooCommerce to use the entire code of Jigoshop. What does this mean for those of us who built websites professionally with WordPress? How do premium theme and plugin providers survive?
In this episode we talk to Andre Gagnon from Project Huddle. Andre has been wrestling with the issue that we all face of trying to gain meaningful comments about static designs and website builds. Often, it’s tricky trying to communicate with clients, but he hopes to solve some of that! It’s worth listening to the very end as he’s a really lovely guy with some great advice!
In today's episode we talk to Puneet Sahalot. He is probably best known as the man behind Power Pack, a Beaver Builder addon pack over at wpbeaveraddons.com. We talk a little bit about what coming up next for PowerPack, but we also talk about two new products, Woo Pack and WP Fomo.
In this episode we interview Adam Hempenstall from BetterProposals.io, a company on a mission to make the dull job of writing proposal for your client work as painless as possible. We’ve all been there, you’ve had the client meeting, then you get back to the office to discover that you’ve lost your mojo, because you have to write that proposal and the blank page just kills your will to live! This can help!
In this weeks episode we discuss the thorny issue of how we communicate with clients; how we communicate our value to clients in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Squarespace and Wix. We talk about the way that we talk to clients and what we do to ensure that they 'get' what it is that we're trying to sell them.
We’re always in groups talking about WordPress software, but rarely do we talk about how we evaluate it. That’s what this episode is about. Do we:
Test software for ourselves? Trust the views of leading influencers? Follow the majority view?
Whatever I do on the internet these days, I seem to be being followed about by Mike Killen, the guest for this week. I see his face everywhere, posting here, in a sponsored post there, I cannot get away from him. The reason for this is that a) he’s really got an understanding how how to be on my radar with his products and services b) he’s just so damn handsome, so I cannot miss him when he does appear.
If you’re anything like me you don’t really like styling sites. Well, enter Sebastian web from Microthemer who has a pretty nice way of speeding things up for us all. We’ve all grown accustomed to page builders so why not have a WordPress interface to speed up the process of writing CSS? Microthemer does that!
Today we are talking about Pods and Beaver Themer with Bernhard Gronau. Where to start? Pod is a free open source plugin available on the WP repository that allows us to easily create Custom Post Types (CPTs) and Custom Fields in WordPress.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast we have a slightly different take from the usual WP related content, because this week, we’re talking to James Rose form Content Snare, which has no connection to WordPress at all! However, fear not, all is not lost because this has a great deal to do with your web design and development business.
This is an episode that I really wanted to do. Generate Press is a WordPress theme that I’ve been using for quite a while now, and it’s my theme of choice. The options that it presents are powerful and yet the theme itself if very lightweight. Hooks galore, tasteful defaults, in short a great WordPress theme.
Today we had a carefully considered and mature debate about the removal of the 50% yearly discount on Woocommerce extensions. We also recorded today's podcast which ... erm... is not entirely like that. LISTENER DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED. That’s not because we use rude words… Nah, it's simply that no-one can resist a warning and we don't have an interesting guest for you this week.
Today we have the hugely talented, young and successful Jack McConnell from Made with Fuel on the show.
Made with Fuel is one-man WordPress web design and development agency based in Bath in the UK that focus on Websites, Online Stores and Membership Sites.
He also makes plugins like Better Notifications for WordPress among others. In this episode he shares his experience of that.
How do we introduce Jim Galiano? Galiano (you need to say that like you’re Robert De Niro), New Yorker accent, grandfather in the boxing business, connections with entertainers. We know what you’re thinking… mafia support... Jim is an online consultant and author who started years ago and has loads to share.
This theme then transitioned into the very popular Dynamik Website Builder (a customizable Child theme for the Genesis Framework) and Genesis Extender (a tool to help customize other Genesis Child theme). "Yeah dude now we're talking... Frameworks are cosmic!". Years of blissful happiness ensued.
Today we rejoice! We have that nice Paul Lacey with us! We are in the WordPress Community! Let's hold hands and sing and dance around the podcasty campfire... Ah, no, no wait, that's too disturbing! In truth, this episode is about Paul's 10 plus year journey working with WordPress.
Chantal, from 1daywebs, turned her website design business away from the tedium long drawn out projects to the heart fluttering thrills of one day web builds. She’s never looked back. D'ya fancy some of that too?
Today we welcome back Robby and Justin from Beaver Builder. The last time they joined us was for our Christmas special. This time it just feels like Christmas. If you didn’t know already the Beaver Builder team have just released their Beaver Themer extension.
This week we talk to not one, but two lovely developers (Nathan Tyler and Natalie MacLees) from California who have a really interesting take on launching their plugin. Their new plugin, Simply Schedule Appointments is launching BEFORE it’s ready!
Today we talked about the price of using WordPress. No, it's not a long sob story about how the wife and kid left us! Those trailer park days are behind us now! The topic came out of a Facebook discussion around a plugin release. It got us thinking about our expectations as "professional" builders of websites.
In this episode (drum roll please) we had the great honor of talking to Amir Helzer. Amir is the CEO of OnTheGoSystems known for WP-Types' Toolset, the WPML multilanguage plugin and also ICanLocalize. Yes, indeed, how did we manage that? More to the point, how did he manage that?
We hate to say it, but DIY website building solutions are getting more attractive all the time. They offer an empowering solution to the "I want a website" problem. Are we facing extinction?
My oh my! Software licenses. What a knotty subject that it. It seems we both came to WordPress seeing software primarily as the tools we use to build websites. I mean who asks a plumber what spanner he (sometimes she) uses to fix a boiler? Okay, maybe Nathan might, but that’s not the point!
Today we ask ourselves what skills do we need to offer a full web design service. That sounded like a great topic. It turns out it's a bit slippery this one.Is a webdesigner like a graphic designer for the web or someone who designs business solutions that are realised on the web?
In what can only be described as a bizarre coincidence today is "World day of making a podcast about WordCamps".
Even more freakily (is that really a word?) we have both just recently attended our first WordCamps. I know, you're right - it’s almost unbelievable!
No guests this week. Just Nathan and David. Two guys in their middle youth chatting about stuff we love. Ok, there maybe little bit of venting, but actually this is quite a nice topic. Happy “Knowledge Base” day ;-)
Today we talk about multiple income streams with Davinder Singh Kainth. Many will know Davinder from his ProBeaver site, weekly newsletter and tireless support in the Beaver Builder Facebook Group.
In this episode we are joined by Adam Lacey from penguinmedia.co.uk. We chat about coping when enthusiastic clients want to exercise their creativity. We ask how much we restrict their role both during and after the website build?
Today we are joined by Doug Belchamber for a chat about the development of page builders. Naturally, we’re huge Beaver Builder fans so this episode is very much inspired by the Alpha release of "Beaver Themer".
In this, episode 13 of the WP Builds podcast, we take a slightly different direction! We have Hani Mourra on, telling us about his experiences building a WordPress plugin in the podcasting space.
This week David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley discuss the 5 tools that they could not live without. This is not supposed to be some sensationalist list that makes you want to go out and buy things! Rather, it’s just the tools that we’ve settled upon after trying out quite a few over the years.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley talk about the feast / famine cycle of being a freelancer. Of course, we don't have the answers, but we we are experimenting with approaches.
In this episode of the WP Builds podcast, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley discuss the subject of work / life balance. What time of the day do you start work, and what time do you stop? Perhaps you work around your family commitments, or do the family have to work around you?
In this, episode 9 of the WPBuilds podcast, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley discuss the topic of promoting a web design business. Being the non-experts that they both are, they do some of the things that they talk about. Most of the ideas are things that they’ve heard about, but don’t do!
David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley explore the notion of "shiny new things". This is when you buy things that, perhaps, you don't need, just because it is new and you don't have it! We find out that Nathan is a complete sucker for buying things that he does not need, will not use, and perhaps does not even want.
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...
Well this is a good episode, we think. This week, we've got two of the founders of the Beaver Builder plugin for WordPress, Justin Busa and Robby MuCullough on the the show.
It's episode 5 of the WP Builds podcast, and, honestly, who'd have thought that we'd get this far? This week we drone on about 'How to make money from WordPress', seeing as we're both fantastically wealthy!!!
In episode 4 of the WP Builds podcast, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley discuss the role of the web developer and how we can sometimes be a thorn in the side of clients. We know that dealing with clients can be painful, but what about us? Do we always do the right thing by our clients?
In episode 3 of the WPBuilds.com podcast Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley discuss clients and what it is about them that makes them so great. We've come up with 13 stereotypical client types and explain more about what we think of them.
In episode 2 of the WPBuilds.com podcast Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley discuss the many ways that WordPress professionals onboard their clients. Simple linear workflows, right through to productising the whole process. There's loads of ways to do it it turns out!
In episode 1 of the WPBuilds.com podcast Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley discuss what it is that makes the Beaver Builder page builder for WordPress so great. We mention quite a few people from the Beaver Builder Facebook group in here too, so, thanks for all your feedback!