Business of WordPress news w/ Rae Morey

WordPress news is hard. I mean, it’s hard to turn it into a real business.

I get away with covering WordPress here on the Matt Report because our guests share lessons on how they built their business or spend time telling us how they navigated the community, until they found their way.

But news? Well, that’s why The WP Tavern has been the only name in town for a while, loaded with two critical components: A dedicated staff and they are funded.

If you want to make it, you do things differently, you do things like Rae Morey‘s The Repository newsletter. Today we’ll chat about building her WordPress news newsletter, background as a journalist, and explore what it really takes to make all of this work.

Thanks goes out to Malcare today for sponsoring a month of Matt Report and The WP Minute. You can help us by visiting buymeacoffee.com/mattrpeort

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Rae: It’s a completely not in the WordPress world at all. So our processes is, as you said, an experiential design and creative technology company, and we develop experiences for cultural and tourism organizations.

[00:00:14] So, you might go into a gallery or museum and experience an audio tour and we create immersive experiences where you can. Wander around a space and he audio that that’s designed, especially for that space. It moves with you around, around the gallery or exhibition. We do precinct technology, virtual queuing, augmented reality experiences, and we do exhibition design in.

[00:00:40] A lot of different spaces, for example we’re doing a a brand new exhibition smack bang in the middle of Montana at the moment for there for first street project there. We do we do the audio guide for the Getty in Los Angeles. So that’s an example of the kind of thing I do for my, my day job.

[00:00:58] There is communications manager. So I look after Publicity marketing anything to do with words, I guess, on the website? Yeah. That’s, that’s kind of what I do for a day. 

[00:01:09] Matt: Does anybody ever give you like a side eye when maybe a customer comes in and they’re like, we have a WordPress website that they look at you and be like, Hey, we think we know somebody who kind of knows this to implement whatever project we might have.

[00:01:23] Rae: I don’t know. I, I, to be honest, I kind of played down what to do with WordPress, because I don’t want to be that person that people kind of like go to asking for, help me with my website. Yeah.

[00:01:33] Oh, I I hate to say, but our website and our process is actually uses Drupal. So I’ve had to learn that this year not, not my decision, but yeah, it’s been interesting seeing what the competitions. 

[00:01:44] Matt: Yeah, that was the, the second, most serious application I used to build websites was Drupal before or slightly after a front page.

[00:01:51] Well, I guess throw Dreamweaver in there too, but we went front page Dreamweaver and then Drupal and then WordPress triples, fantastic platform. I think I wouldn’t use it today, but I th I still think it’s a very powerful 

[00:02:04] Rae: platform using it compared to WordPress at the moment. Very different platforms.

[00:02:10] Matt: Ho