rethink.fm

In this episode, I’m chatting with Gary Jones. I’m honored to have Gary on the show. He is your go-to person when you want things done right. He is a huge asset to the Genesis community and shares his knowledge in so many ways. If you spend any time on Github – you are sure to see his name as a contributor on so many open source projects.

Let’s get started.

Gary Jones is a UK-based WordPress Engineer, code consultant and father of extremely premature twins. Driven by a passion for excellence, he creates elegant WordPress plugins and theme solutions for clients, and provides services, including code audits, for other web designers and developers.

He’s worked on projects for SiteGround, Yoast, StudioPress, Web Savvy Marketing, Daniels Trading, Rolls-Royce and many smaller design and development agencies and individuals.

Gary is a key contributor to the GENESIS FRAMEWORK and has contributed to all except one major branch of WordPress Core since 3.3. He has contributed to many open source projects in the COMMUNITY, and is a co-host on the UK GENESIS PODCAST.

A former teacher in schools and prisons, Gary’s goal is to educate WordPress professionals on how they can improve their code. His motto is knowledge is power.

Gary’s site: Gamajo Tech

WordPress Coding Standards

Open PDF version of this transcript in new window

Jackie Hey, everybody. It’s Jackie D’Elia with another episode of Rethink.fm for you and today I have Gary Jones who is a UK resident and a Genesis expert in our community.

Hey, Gary.

Gary Hi. How are you doing, Jackie?

Jackie Very good. Thanks for joining me on the first episode for season 2, which is kind of awesome to have you here.

Gary Thank you very much.

Jackie For anyone who doesn’t know who you are in the Genesis community, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Gary Absolutely. My name’s Gary Jones. I’m based in Basingstoke in the UK. I run a small virtual agency creating technical WordPress solutions for clients, including integrations with their business critical systems. I’m a contributor to the Genesis Framework and WordPress core and many plugins and open source projects. I’m cohost of the UK Genesis podcast, although we haven’t done many recordings recently, general translation editor for the British English locale in WordPress and organizer of WorkCamp London, father of five-year-old twins, and my background is teaching in schools and prisons.

Jackie Wow. That was awesome. You just went right through the whole thing. That is great.

Gary It helps being prepared ahead of time and actually writing my introduction down this time.

Jackie Yeah. If you’re working in Genesis and you’re in GitHub at all, it’s hard not to see your name all around as a contributor for, like you said, numerous plugins, many open source projects. I see your name as a contributor on a lot of things.

Gary Yeah. A lot of the things that I contribute to are effectually under other people’s names. It’s under their repo or their GitHub name. One of the things I like doing is helping others. Irrespective of the context that might be helping clients or, in this case, helping other developers. If I can contribute something to their plugin then I’ll go ahead and fork it and make the change and send it back to them. If it makes their plugin better and people recognize that there’s a slightly better plugin or slightly better package that has got their name on it, that’s fine by me. I’m actually fine with that.

Jackie I have to say, whenever I see a plugin if I need something in the GitHub repo and I see your name associated with it, I usually think it’s okay to use because I kind of …

Gary Probably, yes.

Jackie I know you’re very thorough and you’ve got a really good background on one of the things we were chatting about before the shows is that you do some code audits and I’ve known that you’ve done that in the past for other developers, for businesses, for individuals.

That would be my first question I think I want to ask you is how did you kind of formalize an approach to do code audits? How did you evolve into that?

Gary I enjoy reading code. It’s as simple as that. My background is teaching, in education and helping others, so if I could combine sitting there reading code and analyzing and look to see where it can be done better with somebody whose efforts, maybe it’s for a free plugin, maybe it’s for some client work, maybe it’s for a premium product that they’re trying to sell. If I could look through the code, make suggestions and educate that will use it as a tool to educate them so they become a better developer with the benefit that they have a slightly better product at the end of it, then I enjoy doing that.

I enjoy sitting down, sharing the screens for two hours and going through line by line, say “Have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about adding support for internationalization or making it more accessible or adding support for right to left scripts?” Or just reorganizing the code in such a way that it will reduce bugs and has a conflict driven approach that makes future edits even easier to do. Kind of easier maintenance.

There’s lots of reasons for doing the code audit and it’s just something that I found that I enjoyed. Word of mouth was that people would send other people to me to do that. Then the formalization process was very simple. It was, kind of, an hourly rate to a fixed price for a couple of hours of going through the product line by line and then at the end of it the person who we’re doing the code audit for can take all those notes and implement whichever they agreed with in their own time.

It’s not necessarily me just fixing up their code and them learning nothing. It really is effectively teaching them how to fish so that they can then know for next time, so when they do their second theme or an extension to their plugin, they’ve got that knowledge and everybody, WordPress users, WordPress ecosystem in general, is better off for it because they’re plugin is now more accessible. Every plugin they do is more accessible, for instance.

It was one of my ways to contribute back and just brought a little bit of side income in as well.

Jackie Awesome.

How did you stay up to date with coding standards so that you know how to advise people about ways to do things and maybe refactoring and new ways to do things? How do you stay on top of all of that?

Gary In terms of the formal code standards, there is the WordPress Coding Standards. There’s a document on the make.wordpress.org site that covers the actual coding standards. There’s also a set of sniffs, they call them, for PHP CodeSniffer and I’m involved in that as well.

That’s kind of the formal side of things about whether you should have commas after every line in an array and whether associative arrays should be multi line or whether certain functions should be escaped or not escaped or recognized and highlighted and so on. There’s all of that sort of side of things.

Beyond that, it’s just my own experience and just conveying that. If you’ve got a function call that accepts an array, instead of just dropping that array right into that function call. It just separates out the data from the logic, so that you perhaps, halfway through your development you can do something else with that array. You can extract it out into somewhere completely separate so that your function or your logic now will accept any array. So that when you come down to doing some unit testing, you can say, “well let’s throw in a duff array that’s got completely random data. Does our logic still work? Does it handle the edge cases and the errors and the exceptions and so on?” It’s just my experience in getting that across and saying, “if you do this, then this is the benefit you’ll get.” To your end users, they won’t notice any difference, but you’ll get some benefit from unit testing or by your editor being able to and therefore autosuggest how to auto complete some of the code. It’s just experience that I’ve learned over the last 18 years or so that’s conveying to them to make them better developers.

Jackie Okay, what code editor are you using currently?

Gary I use PHP Storm. For a long time I was … What did I start off with? I think it was just basic Notepad to start with. Then I moved on to Sublime Text, Sublime Text 2 and then number 3. I love that. I like the fact that you could add in individual plugins or extensions to the Sublime Text system and you could have your code linter in there. You could auto-arrange, auto-align different things. It’s fantastic. I still use Sublime Text for either very basic code editing or more likely for writing markdown documentation and so on. [inaudible 00:08:00] PHP Storm. I tried it once and it was too much. I couldn’t get to grips with it. There was too much going on. Didn’t like it. There’s a free course by a gentleman called Jeffrey Way that’s under the [inaudible 00:08:20] Podcast system things that he does. There’s a free course which I recommend completely and totally for anybody who is even considering moving to PHP Storm is to get PHP Storm. You can get the free evaluation edition to run through this course. Pretty much the first session is: Turn this off, that off, and the other off and really simplify down to just an editor.

The actual power of PHP Storm … Yes, you can integrate your version control and command line and all your other tools. Actually some of it comes from the auto-complete which you still get even if everything else is turned off. Running through that, when I found out the second time, then I’ve stuck with it ever since. I know that I don’t use PHP Storm to its full potential. Every now and then I say, “well, is there a new feature?” Kind of re-map some of the key commands to Sublime Text so that I haven’t got to learn two different sets of keyboard shortcuts. Between the two of them, everything gets written. PHP Storm is good in so much as there’s an extension for it: EA Coding, I think it’s called. That will highlight potentially bad practices with the PHP. Even if I’ve just written the same code it will highlight, “oh, did you mean to do this? Did you mean to do that? Have you thought about this?” It will highlight potential errors that Sublime Text wouldn’t, and that I wouldn’t have necessarily caught manually. It actually helps me to write code in several different ways.

Jackie Have you tried Atom?

Gary No, I’ve not. I’ve seen it around a lot. I’ve seen lots of praise for it. I might have loaded the website, but not gotten any further than that with it.

Jackie I’ve tried Atom as well as PHP Storm and I did go through the Laracast free courses, the videos on that and I found them very helpful in configuring and setting up Atom. I mean PHP Storm. I’ve also tried Atom because I’ve seen that used a lot now on Lynda courses and LinkedIn Learning courses that they’re teaching. A lot of the developers that are instructors on there are using Atom. Now Atom’s free, so that’s a great choice for somebody who’s looking for a free code editor and it does have the sniffer packages that you can install. I use that now in mine so that when I am writing code or when I save a specific PHP file, it automatically formats it and lets me know if there’s any coding errors in the file. Very similar to how PHP Storm works. That is another option for folks. PHP Storm does have a yearly cost to it, and Atom is another choice. I used Sublime Text as well earlier on and I found Sublime and Atom to be very similar. I think Atom is easier to install packages and manage that process than Sublime Text was. That’s another option for folks if you wanted to do that. For some developers that are just starting off or are not what they should be doing coding in the WordPress space, you said that there’s WordPress coding standards. I know there’s a PHP sniffer that you can install that will monitor whether or not you’re using the WordPress coding standards. Can you talk about that, and your involvement in it, and how would somebody go about implementing that?

Gary Yep, so there’s a command line tool called PHP code sniffer. It’s by a company called Squizz Labs, so it’s an unusual name, but that makes it very easy to find. They support various different coding standards, the coding standards, PSR2, obviously WordPress, and so on. That’s just the tool which comes with a few sniffs and a few checks. The WordPress coding standards is a separate repository that is in PHP so as a tool for checking your PHP, it’s easy to see and understand how this tool is built. It will look through your files and it will break all the PHP code down into separate tokens. Could be a token of an open bracket followed by the word ‘echo’ would be a separate token. It’s all broken down. Then it looks at combinations. Is there a bracket followed by a croat? Perhaps you’ve got an array or something like that. Also, hang on a minute, the WordPress coding standard says you need to space in between there. For a lot of these individuals checks, all of these different sniffs, for WordPress coding standards. They’re trying to increase more is actually kind of automatic fixes as well. You could run this command line tool over your code and it’ll say, “okay, you’ve got a thousand errors.” It could then say, “well actually, I could fix 800 of these automatically.” So you run a slightly different tool and there you go, it’s fixed most of them. Give it a once over. Commit it to then go ahead and check out these 200 other errors. As well as individual white space errors or whether you’re using short syntax or long syntax for arrays, it will also check things for WordPress coding standards. It’ll check things like: are you escaping your output? It will say, “Well, you’ve got echo something.” It’ll say, “well hang on a minute, that’s not escaped. I was expecting escape HTML in that context.” Or you’re doing in an attribute you’re just doing ‘get permalink’. Well it will say, “hang on a minute, I’m expecting that to be escaped.” So there’s lots of things there that will be able to help with the escaping and the sanitization and potentially validation. It’s good coding practice. The WordPress coding standards are split into WordPress core, WordPress VIP which counts as being on the VIP with automatic, and WordPress Extra. The combination of core and extra means you not only get whatever is documented in that make.wordpress.org handbook, but the extra stuff is also things that we think you should be doing as best practices.

You can configure all of these to say, “well I want these checks, but I don’t that checked.” Or “Want it to be a bit stricter or a bit more lenient.” So you can configure how these checks are done against your existing code base or how you want it for your new plugin or your new thing that you’re doing. It’s just very flexible, but at the same time there’s a de facto, default behavior that pretty much all developers in the WordPress space should be following. As I said, you can add in your own exceptions if there’s good reasons for that, but if you’ve got no existing code practices, coding standards for your company or at the company level. This is a very good way to make sure that the code you’re writing can be readable and understandable and fixable without any obvious noticeable difference in code style between you and somebody else.

Jackie I think what you were talking about is maybe the PHP code beautifier and fixer? When I configured Atom, and I think it’s also in PHP Storm too. It can automatically do a lot of these fixes for you. I did notice in Genesis sometimes with the escaping there’s some Genesis functions that you might get a warning on and you might have to do some exceptions in your configuration file to say, “hey, it’s okay. This has been escaped, but you just don’t think it has.”

You had some notes in a repo somewhere, I could have sworn I read that about. You had that same challenge. I was getting the same error and I was like, “Okay I don’t understand this part. How am I going to fix this?” And then I saw that actually there was a way to put some exceptions in there. Say, “no, this is okay. You can ignore that one.”

Gary Yeah, the particular function is Genesis_attr for Genesis attributes. If you’re doing a Genesis theme chances are you want that as an exception in your config file.

Jackie If you want to choose a base coding standard for WordPress, just the WordPress would be the one to choose if you were going to pick, right? You’d want to go with just WordPress?

Gary For most things, because you’d have exceptions like that. You’re config file would be in your plugin or in your theme. I can basically say, yeah, choose WordPress probably exclude the VIP. That would give you the WordPress Core, and the WordPress Extra and the WordPress docs, it’s actually a separate rule set, but it all kind of falls under the same thing.

Jackie So, you could actually configure like, three rule sets and then just exclude the VIP. Then you could also do some exceptions of your own in that file? I think it’s like a … Is it an XML file if I’m just …?

Gary Yeah, PHPCS.xml. , and then probably if it’s a plugin or theme that you’re distributing you’d put .dist on the end. The advantage of that one is that, that is the conflict file that you distribute, but if somebody wants to override it locally they can have PHPCS.XML which you would put in your ‘get ignored’ so that anything you’ve got isn’t distributed as well.

That would then just override the conflict file that you distributed, so you’d actually get the best of both worlds, distributed and local configuration.

Jackie So, that’s a great starter if you are not using any coding standards, and you’re just writing PHP code in WordPress. It will work with all of these code editors you can just find the package that goes with the code editor that you’re using. You install it. You can immediately … You can either run it from the command line, you can have it go through all your PHP files at one time and make all of these corrections and give you a notification of all the problems and errors. I do it in mine. Every time I edit and save a file, it just automatically does the PHP CBF Beautify. So, it reorganizes the file so that it corrects for most of the things. Then anything that’s left is going to show up in the bottom of my window. It says, “hey I found six errors.” It underlines them and shows you where they are.

Gary Yeah, and you can also tie into . . If you’re doing any kind of continuous integration, so if you’re using Travis or Scrutinizer or Bit Bucket Pipeline which is what I’ve been using a lot at the moment. You can set those up so that it will say, “hey pull down the WordPress coding standards, set it up, and run PHPCS against your repo and your newest. Then you’ll get a file that says, “hey this is being checked.” Instead of running it locally, you you can it on every commit as well.

Jackie Oh, that’s very good. All right.

So, we’ve kind of covered the things that I wanted to ask you about as far as coding standards and code editors and things like that. Just want to roll back to Genesis in general.

I know you’re involved in the Genesis Slack channel. That’s where a lot of conversations go if you’re a Genesis developer and you haven’t found that, or you’re using Genesis. It’s a great resource to join the Slack channel.

Do you still use Genesis on most of your projects that you do for client work?

Gary Yep, absolutely, yeah. If there’s a theme involved we will push them to use Genesis even if it’s a custom child theme that we build from scratch or adapt an existing one or theme out there. Yes, it’ll always be Genesis. That’s just what I’m familiar with and what my team are familiar with.

Jackie Why do you like Genesis, in general over maybe some other frameworks if you really want to call Genesis a framework or just a parent theme? I’m not really sure. You have a couple of options. Why did you choose Genesis and why do you continue to use it?

Gary I originally stepped into Genesis, before that I was using a different parent/stroke framework, and I try to contribute back. The lead developer there just wasn’t interested at all. It was like, “okay, well yeah. Your theme is okay. I think things could be done better, but you’re not willing to accept.” I got introduced to Brian Gardner via email and he made the fatal mistake of saying, ” oh, if there’s anything you think could be improved, let me know.” For those who know my reputation, you’ll know that I’m not afraid to say, “yeah, there’s certain things you could do better.” So I sent him a big email saying, “yeah there’s certain things you could do better.” He was like, “wow, okay. We need to get you involved here somehow.”

That’s how I stepped into it. From there just making contributions to the Genesis Core. There’s certain things and some areas like the breadcrumb stuff is stuff that I completely rewrote. It’s been adapted and updated and probably improved and fixed since then. There’s certain areas that I know that predominantly were my original contributions, and that’s great.

Beyond that, for a few reasons, familiarity with the code. Its the ability to still be allowed to contribute even if I know that some of the contributions I make, not necessarily wind people up, but are trying to push Genesis in the direction that others might feel that it doesn’t need to go. My whole goal is to bring Genesis kicking and screaming into a modern development workflow that everybody can be proud of to use on the development of Genesis side of things. Beyond that, it’s then the community, there’s fantastic resources, as a tool itself, if I’m doing multiple websites then I’ve only got one code base to code against. If we’ve got clients who’ve got multiple websites they’ve only got one tool to learn, because obviously they don’t interact too much with the actual theme itself just the features that Genesis has got. Lots of plugins for it. Its a whole community in itself. A community of people, and tools and support and tutorials. I enjoy that community. I can contribute to it in different ways. I like the whole setup of everything there. I’ve got no plans to move away from it.

Jackie Do you find it’s easier to customize or develop a child theme in Genesis versus in WordPress Core, just do a child theme there? I’m asking that because I watch a lot of videos for instruction, especially on Lynda. Many times I’ll see Morton Rand Hendricksen, he’ll do a video and he’s not using Genesis. He’s doing things like, just for a typical child theme in WordPress. To me it looks sometimes more complex. A little bit more difficult to work in there. The beauty that I think in Genesis is the hooks and the filters make it very easy to intervene, make your changes, and produce a result in a very logical fashion versus having to go in and edit a bunch of individual files. Then you gotta remember where all of those edits are. To me the beauty of the way the Genesis is structures is, even if I create a lot of partial PHP files for my … Break apart all of my code specific functions like all of my theme setup can go in one file. All of my widget setups can go in another file. My default for the themes can go in another one. Then I’ve got another PHP script for handling all of loading of all of the assets, whether they’re the JS or anything else. Your fonts, everything can be all in one place.

The beauty of that is that those are more like configuration files to me. It just seems to much easier to understand to be able to adapt ad quickly change things versus having to go in and like edit your header.php file and your footer.php file. There’s lots of people who do it that way and love that way that that works. I just scratch my head a lot of times. I don’t understand why you would want to do it that way versus this nice configuration that’s already available to use.

Gary No, I completely agree. The use of the action hooks and filters within Genesis means that if you can write a plugin, but you’ve never touched a theme before, well you can edit and customize a Genesis child theme. It’s exactly the same. If you understand there’s certain hook points and there’s a callback and there’s a priority for that and maybe some passed in, you understand all you need to know. Combine that with the conditional function so it’s home is “front page” or is front, is archive, is single and all those. You can configure everything you want and as you said, it allows much more flexibility in terms of splitting up the child theme into an array or several files worth of array configurations plus some logic that handle those so that they can be class files, plus then some views that has got your html with a php values, escapes and echoes into it. For me, in my mindset, that works far better than having templates or partial templates that are mixture of some logic and some data and the views side of things. Yeah, I can’t see the benefit of learning something new when actually I’m writing enough plugin themes that I understand the hooks and filters and can make use of it within a child theme as well. I realize it’s different to how many of the child themes work out there, but I love that level of abstractness. That works for me and I can build on top of that in a way that partial templates and some of the other features of 2017 and 2016 and the like don’t have.

Jackie Well, we covered what we like about Genesis, so next question would be: What would you like to see changed and you briefly touched on the direction you’d like to see Genesis move into. What’s your vision for the future for that? What would you like to see?

Gary Probably three things that I’d like generally addressed in no particular order. First would be, code standards. There’s aspects which we’re talking about the code standards that Genesis still has issues with. Genesis 2.5 will be much better than Genesis 2.4. there’s still room for improvement in there. Its not necessarily has it’s own coding standards so much as there’s aspects of it that just doesn’t follow the WordPress coding standards. When you run the WordPress coding standards sniffs against Genesis you might get hundreds of errors. If we could clear out most of those by adhering to the WordPress coding standards, I will show up with things like, “oh certain values aren’t escaped.” Or certain things you’re using, the post data or getdata without actually sanitizing it for instance. It will show up the more important, critical ones if we can get rid of the fluff coding standards reports that are coming in.

Second one would be more config and class driven so that at the moment, much of Genesis is procedural code. There’s all functions in there. There’s a new thing within Genesis 2.5. I’m not sure if we can say about it yet, but basically its split up into a config and a couple of classes so that if, as, and when the config values, the data needs to change, that can be done without even touching the logic for that within the actual classes.

That then leads nicely onto the third item which would be to have more unit tests. Yes, you can test functional code, but with classes, when you’re just dealing with that logic you can say, “right, if I give you a certain value into your class method, does it produce the right result that I’m looking for?” You can test all the different code branches, well if you give it duff data, do you get an exception, and so on. So by splitting that the procedural code out into that config and that class you allow it to be more unit testable. Genesis does have unit tests. Its not distributed so most people probably won’t know that they’re out there. There’s certainly a low percentage of code coverage at the moment of which we’re trying to do those kind of two, not the code status as much but do that second and that third item on the agenda so that we do get a high level of code coverage. We can be more confident that when we write some, re-write some code so that the procedural codes are just wrappers for the class-based code. We’ve got the unit test to say, “actually yeah, you’re still producing exactly the same behavior.” Or, “no, you’re meant to be returning an array, but now you’re returning an array of integers instead of strings” or whatever it might be.

So, certainly that’s where I’m trying to push Genesis at the moment. It’s to just take little bits of pieces. Let’s take the Genesis update. At the moment, the Genesis updates … If you were to update from Genesis 1, probably not that far back, but say Genesis 1.0 the code would end up running through a series of functions that do version based updates and then one function that does a whole load of updates for particular versions all in one go. We could extract that into a series of class, so we could have Genesis 2.3 update, Genesis 2.2 update, Genesis 2.1 update and just kickstart the method in each of that so that we could then test that in unit tests, do integration tests for that individual update to say, “if we run this, does our database now show it’s got an extra value in it or not an extra value?” Or whatever the change to the database might be. We’d be able to test that far easier than what we’ve got at the moment which predominantly comes down to manual testing. The more we can move to unit tests and integration tests with Genesis the far happier and confident everyone will be about how things are working as they should be working.

Jackie How about code base in Genesis? The XHTML code in there. Do you see any need to maybe remove that at some point? Or separate the versions where you leave the XHTML code and maybe just do security updates for it? At some point, let’s just say you’ve got HTML5 and then you have the next standard that comes out after that. How long do you think its feasible to leave all of that code in there to support all of these different versions?

Gary I think predominantly that’s going to come down to a business decision. That’s well outside my remit. I don’t work for StudioPress or Copyblocker or Digital. So that’s for Brian and Nathan to decide ultimately. Much of the markups only for 2.4/2.5 goes through what we call the Genesis markup API. It’s not an API in the strict sense, but basically any time there’s markup to be output it goes through a particular function which accepts what the markup should be whether it’s in the HTML5 mode or the XHTML mode. That’s the way they’ve gone forward in that. I proposed a different scenario where as we try to move more things to views, which Genesis 2.5 will have a views folder and the actual markup in there where possible. I suggested, let’s have HTML5 views and XHTML views directory. Then basically on the earliest point you work out, are we supporting one mode or the other and just set the directory path to whichever one was relevant. That way then you get a whole load of files in a directory that basically aren’t being used. It’s not loading them. It’s not affecting performance and so on.

Whereas at the moment it is a bit of a mixture. At some point in the future, they’ll say, “right, at version 3 or in 2018 or at some point that they feel is a good business decision. Yes, we’re now going to take it all out and simplify it all down so we just have it in the HTML5 markup in there.

Jackie What have you been rethinking in your business and how you work this year versus last year or the year before. How is that affecting what you’re planning to do?

Gary Over the last couple years I’ve been in an odd situation. I’ve got one long term client who just keeps giving more work and more work and more work and they are fantastic clients in every which way. That’s kind of led me to the odd situation where I’ve basically done no marketing. What I’m trying to push for this year is to effectively sort out my websites, sort out the positioning that I’ve got which is something that I’ve never really established. I’ve just been a generalist. To sort out the market in terms of what my reputation is with the Genesis community or with the WordPress community with the developer community shall we say. Which isn’t going to be advantageous or useful when I’m trying to market to business with large budget who need a partner to work with them on creating a new website or creating new features or whatever they might need. Part of that is working out my positioning and working out I can convey that within the content of my website. Just the whole brand, really. Which for a company who is going to be 9 years old is quite an unusual step. I’ve never had to dive into it as much as I’ve done so far. I’m trying to balance between the code, the individual projects that I’m coding at the moment, plus project management between the couple of main clients that I’ve got and my team. And sorting out this marketing so that I can move forward in the long term and get more leads in of the type of business that I’m after. Potentially then take on a bigger team to handle that work and grow the company that way. The rethinking is all about establishing the business and not taking the fact into account that I’m 8 years old already. How can I grow? Where do I want to grow? Which direction do I want to grow? Putting myself out there. Ultimately, I think it comes down to ‘monetizing my knowledge’ is the phrase that I keep saying to myself. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours learning about the code and establishing a reputation, good, bad, or otherwise within certain communities. It’s, “how can I turn that now into money in my pocket from the businesses who need that skillset, or who need that experience and that advice and that guidance?” It’s all about the business now. I’ve definitely changed phases in the last six months, I’d say, from …The thing that kick started it is my main client had their business arrangement was such that they were potentially being taken over and said, “well for quarter 1 of 2017 we might need to cut down on the amount of work that we can send your say. Just for three months, just so that our books look better. So that when we’re taken over, we can get a higher share price and higher dividend price and so on.” Because of that and obviously, not as heavily supporting the people in my team as such, but wanting to make sure there’s sufficient work to send their way and support me as well. I really need some extra leads. I can’t have all my eggs in one basket. We’re starting to get more leads in. Starting to diversify. To do that properly we need proper marketing and to really set the business on the right path to growing in a way that it really should be growing.

Jackie Any plans to have some more episodes on the UK Genesis Podcast? I loved listening to it. I must listen to every episode that should you guys recorded. I miss it.

Gary Yeah, yeah we did, I think up to 25 episodes. We did quite a few. We recorded them every two weeks or so. The reason why we stopped is that we effectively dried up of the people who I knew were willing to come on as UK based Genesis users/developers/designers/Genesis professionals. We got to a stage where we dried up and just that’s it for now. Now we’ve left it probably a year and a half, something like that. It’s been awhile since we’ve done one. Obviously we do know more people in the Genesis UK community so it’s just a case of finding some time. Joe and I have only recently finished the Wordcamp London. Having [inaudible 00:38:13] organized last year. I was the organizer last year and I was the organizer this year. So now that’s done, maybe there’s some more free time amongst all that project management and marketing and all the other bits and pieces.

it would be great to do that. I think it provides value to those … The reason why we originally started it was that I was getting leads and Joe was getting leads saying, “right. I’ll use Genesis”, or “I want to use Genesis, but I want to develop for in the UK.” Timezone considerations and so on. It’s like, “well we know a few, but we don’t know that many. There must be a community out there.” So we set up the UK Genesis community, as it were. We wanted to have a directory of contact details so we could say, “hey go look at this. There’s a whole load over there. Go and make contact with each of these people who you think might be suitable.” Work on your business that way. Ultimately, we ended up just having the podcast which were hour long interviews with the individuals and just find out about their business, how they work, and again the tools they use. Then some quickfire questions which I think was really useful for showcasing them. Those 25 hours do act like a showcase that they could use or direct people towards. We even had Mike Little on there. We know he’s a Genesis user. He’s a co-founder of WordPress based in the UK. So as a Genesis user we very fortunately managed to get him on for an hour. I’d love to do it again. I do enjoy the podcast. It’s just finding the time and finding what value it can give to me. I contribute to lots of different things. There’s usually an ulterior motive of to why I’m contributing to a certain plugin. Its because, “oh, I’m using it myself and I need a bug fixed”. Or, “I’m using Genesis.”, or “I want Genesis improved.” Or same for WordPress Core. Its for the UK Genesis podcast, it’s “okay, what value is it giving to me and my business in terms of where I want to push it?” If that all matches up or if I can find the reason there to join it up then, yeah, absolutely we’ll start contacting some UK people and say, “right, let’s set a date. You come on and do a live show for an hour. Talk about yourself.” Which most people can usually do without too much practice beforehand. Let’s get you an hour on there.

Jackie Is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up?

Gary No, I think we’re good. For me, everything is rethinking at the moment for my business and moving forward. It’s good to be busy. There’s lots going on. I probably need to cut down on some things, but yeah. I think everyone just needs to keep going exactly what they’re doing. If they find it’s not working, change it in some way and move forwards.

Jackie All right, well thank you Gary for joining me on the show. I hope everybody got a lot out of it. I know I did. If folks want to reach out to you and follow you or touch base with you, how can they reach you?

Gary I’m on several different Slacks. The Genesis Slack and the WordPress Slack. I’m on there as GaryJ. I’m also on the UK WordPress Slack under the same name as well. Main website would be gamajo.com, so either look for gamajo or GaryJ or Gary Jones on most profile sites. Twitter as well is GaryJ.

Jackie All right, well thank you again, Gary. Thanks to everybody else for listening and tune in to the next episode.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Carrie Dils. Carrie is pure awesome. She shares her thoughts on this past year, and what she has planned for 2017 including an upcoming book, Real World Freelancing with Diane Kinney. She is the host of one of my favorite WordPress business podcasts, OfficeHours.fm and is a huge Genesis fan.

Let’s get started.

Carrie Dils is a WordPress developer, consultant, speaker and teacher based in Fort Worth, Texas.

She loves sharing what she’s learned with others to help them be more successful in their business.

She hosts a weekly WordPress podcast at OfficeHours.fm and is a course instructor for Lynda.com.

Carrie’s site: CarrieDils.com
Podcast: OfficeHours.fm
Twitter: @cdils
Courses: Carrie’s Courses on Lynda.com

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In this episode, I’m chatting with Cathi Bosco. Cathi is the creative genius that powers her web studio in Madison CT USA.

We’re talking all about collaboration on projects, lessons learned and some of our favorite design elements. She shares her industry knowledge and experience to help us forge a way forward in this ever changing digital age.

Let’s get started.

Creative Director, Digital Consultant, Web Designer, Artist, Illustrator, Children’s Book Author, trail runner, dog lover & free thinker…

My specialty is creating beautiful and cohesive web presence packages for clients that can convert audiences and present content elegantly (think modern and clean presentation). Our sites are built on The Genesis Framework and they function exceptionally well for a wide range of programs, communities, organizations and companies.

If you have an unusual challenge – we are all ears… tell us about your project and ideas! We don’t take on each and every proposal that comes along, but if we feel we can add value to your plans or programs, we’ll gladly get you a quote and get to work for you.

I also think CSS transitions and CSS + SVG animations are very effective slightly below the surface. Designed to feed the human reward system. Always leaving the end user ‘in control’ of the navigation but royally rewarded aesthetically. This is for upper-end projects and can also help to differentiate sites from low-end, non-custom work… when done well. We all love this stuff… transitions and animations that are so subtle they beautifully and intriguingly enhance end user experiences. Along with collaboration, they are key to forward momentum for Genesis developers and designers

Bio Page: About Cathi

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In this episode, I’m chatting with Matt Pritchett. He is a UX developer and lives in Tennessee.

We’re talking the good, the bad and the ugly about local development environments. What’s out there now and why Matt plans to build one of his own called AnchorWP. Matt is a super smart guy and I’ve had the pleasure of being in a weekly mastermind group with him this year.

Let’s get started.

Matt is known for transformational WordPress development and bringing integrity to each relationship, sale, project, and interaction.

He’s a developer, blogger, business owner, product maker and proud husband and father of three.

Matt’s Website: Pritchett Media

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I’m in trouble, I’ve got to figure out a quick win, and I came across WordPress and it was the answer to a prayer, almost.

We wanted to talk about local development environments today. That was the inspiration for us chatting. We’re in a mastermind group together. I know you’ve been rethinking some things. I thought this would be a great opportunity to just talk about it. There’s many different ways to do things, and I think, for some folks that are just starting off, it can be daunting to figure out what direction to go and how to do things. I know I wrote a post a couple months ago about my code journey for the past three years. When I first started on that journey, I wasn’t developing locally. I was talking about how I transitioned into developing locally and why, and what impact that had on my workflow and everything.

Some of the projects that you just mentioned, it sounds like there’s two different ways that this is handled. Some where you can actually configure your box, your local development environment, to emulate where you’re going to be hosting your site later, and that’s an advantage. Can you just talk about that?

In this episode, I’m chatting with Kim Doyal. She runs Kim Doyal, The WordPress Chick podcast, and several other internet businesses.

We’re talking about Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell. It’s a story Kim shared with me about finding gems right in your own backyard. Many of us have been looking for success, thinking the grass is always greener elsewhere. Is there an opportunity right in front of you that you have not seen? Something you’re good at that you are not leveraging? That is the basis of the story and why we sometimes see the success of others as a goal to pursue, when there might be diamonds buried in our own backyard.

Let’s get started.

Kim Doyal runs the W Chick – podcaster, is a coach, WordPress wizard, proud Genesis junkie and co-founder of the #FtheHustle movement.

According to Kim, when you commit to fully showing up as YOU, everything shifts in your business.

That advice might sound simple, but it took me almost 5 years as an entrepreneur to truly understand the power and the potential of fully showing up as ME.

Kim’s Website: The WP Chick

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And listening to all this stuff and Tony Robbins was speaking in Robert Kiyosaki and then there were these little you know breakout sessions and this guy was talking about internet marketing and how you was making you know $8000 – $9000 a month selling e-books. And I was like Wow. And I had also at the time I was a big. And this is holy going to date me but I’m like I was a big tape cassette person in the car right. Like when I would be commuting for work and stuff. I was always putting something into my head most of the time it was motivational or business or you know and I was listening to this. It was actually this is actually a CD program. So it was a little bit more recent but it was a Mark Victor Hansen one of the chicken soup guys had done this mega speaking empire because I was a speech major for a while in college. So it’s really fun that I do podcasting now too because it’s like it’s transcended but I was listening to this mega speaking empire CD set. Right? And there was this other internet marketer and he was talking about internet marketing and you know affiliate marketing and all of these things and I thought this is this is the way to go this is totally the way to go. And I just knew there was something in it and I was not a tech person. Jackie and I mean I would always consider myself somewhat smart like I can figure this out but I just I was committed to making it work. Long story shorter and I jumped into this and I really thought I was going to be an information marketer which I am.

But you know I thought I was going to write a few e-books and make millions at all that you get into this and you go and there’s a little bit more to learn here so you know my company today like what we do. So I am shifting out of the client work. I still have some clients I don’t have a portfolio on the site. It’s all referrals if I choose to do client work. And so a lot of people say well how do you monetize the site. I mean I do coaching. I have another podcast well I’ve got two, the WordPress chick and I’ve had sponsorship on there. But I do coaching we do Web sites we’ve done podcast production for people. I am going I’m shifting a little bit back to courses in teaching and training and then a recurring model which is actually going to be a physical newsletter that comes in the mail and there’s a whole reason behind that. So it’s evolving right now more than anything I’m focusing on my audience, the brand and just simplicity. I just want simple systems in place.

I mean it totally it blew up my business and let me explain that because it was you know initially it was I was completely detached from the outcome of what it did and what it was going to do. And while I’m sure there was probably more data I didn’t go looking for it – it was really something I did for myself and it was content so I knew there’s value in it – within like three months iTunes was one of my top three traffic sources which blew me away. The relationships there’s this sort of there’s the tangible side of podcasting and there’s the intangible right so the tangible is traffic. I’ve gotten coaching clients, I’ve gotten website clients I’ve gotten you know joint venture opportunities, the relationships piece of it where the on one hand that’s tangible. On the other hand that pays off for you can’t really measure you and I mean it pays off in terms of how long those relationships last or what comes out of it. But the podcast I have said it before I’ll say it again is absolutely the best thing I’ve done for my business.

But if people get that or what I’m saying resonates with them it’s you know and I don’t want to put it in I don’t mean this coldly but it’s like that’s a warm lead. Like that’s a connection right there. Like it floors me when I think about the fact that people will take me for a walk. Right. And they’re just out on a walk just listening to me for an hour it’s like it’s an intimate relationship in a way that you form to somebody and so and it’s something I don’t take lightly. So I have stepped into a lot of things that I thought were uncomfortable initially were sharing something personal that maybe I thought I was never going to share this. I only share if it’s of value. You know like if I learn something the hard way or if I’ve launched something or done something or something turned out to be you know a really great outcome for something that I’ve done. So it’s like I share the Good, the Bad, the Ugly all of it in a way that I hope somebody else can benefit from that experience. But yeah you know I just write those out and I don’t know it just flows.

And so I sort of found that I had built up a lot of traffic to those tutorials and I thought of them and Genesis came out you know I stepped into this WordPress Genesis for beginners. I did like four week webinar classes then I did a PDF and then I did an updated for 2.00 which you know the theme settings haven’t changed that much but so I kind of stepped into that and that was really that’s my space. And so I had to own it that well not everybody who uses WordPress. wants a developer teaching them how to do something or they want to know how to use this tool to make money with their business. And you know over I don’t know it’s probably going to last couple of years. The more I’ve really stepped into marketing because I am not saying I got backlash but it’s like I just I don’t like the negativity and the fact that there’s a hashtag #WPDrama is ridiculous to me you know and I always look at it this way and maybe this is really a simplistic way to say it but I’m like you know people who are making money doing something they love it’s like you really don’t have time to go get nasty with people. You just do your thing. You just we don’t all have to do in like the same things. It’s ridiculous to me and there when I see because you can have somebody who knows how to market and write copy and they’ve got a crappy product. But who’s going to you know be laughing all the way to the bank.

And I’m not saying that that means you go sell crappy products that’s not the message there. But the point is all of it’s relevant. Right? And so I’m actually getting ready to change that theme on my site. And I have switched I used to do this WordPress happiness made easy – it doesn’t make much sense it’s not very clear. And so now it’s a place where WordPress and marketing collide because that’s sort of my happy space. I like creating content I love creating content. I like creating courses I like showing people how to. You need a list. You need to build a list you need an audience you need to connect to them you need to engage them and you need to sell to them. I don’t care how perfect your code is or how fast your site is. If you’re not building a list of subscribers because that’s an asset then you’re not really in business. You need every single business offers leads and sales. I don’t care what market you’re in or what you do. And so I had to kind of say where do I want to fit into this. I still love some of the techie stuff. I still like showing how to use things but you know I like to create as well and I just I never wanted to be a coder or developer or you know my gifts to the world to me or not to be behind the scenes and I’m not saying I have to be on stage but I want to create I don’t want to be a pair of hands creating someone else’s business because that’s how it feels to me. I’m not saying it is.

But that’s how it feels because I have things that I want to create and put out there that answer any of your questions I’m like I think I’ve talked in circles.

Any person out there that does work that maybe does WordPress websites that they’ve got you know client work at the end of the day if you simply share the things you’re doing like I’m all about leverage. So here’s an example. I started doing these daily emails. I subscribed to a guy named Ben Settle and I wish to God I got a commission because I pimp him every where. And because I I’m going to back up a little bit. I hired a Facebook ad agency at the beginning of this year kind of ended to 2015 and Jason Hornung it was fantastic. I was doing this kind of higher ticket higher price done for you podcasting service because I believe in the power of podcasting. There’s so many ways to leverage it. And it was great at the same time it’s still service it’s just people view me more as a consultant because I’ve got a team that does a lot of the tech stuff. But anyways so I thought OK I’m going to drive this with Facebook ads. It was a big investment. I got the money back in the ads. But the beauty of working with them is that I step back Jason really. Jason Hornung I think I said that so he great guy but I really stepped back and started looking at copywriting a like basic fundamentals of direct response marketing. Like what works. Content, you know, good copywriting email marketing. Those those basic things whether it’s you know maybe it’s postcards or whatever because that stuff still works too. But so I started kind of going backwards and mastering these fundamentals. And like I’ve gotten a little bit obsessed with it where it’s looking at the strategies that work as opposed to tactics right.

Like I had Todd Brown on the show and he’s in a big internet marketer and stuff. And he’s the same thing it’s like he said I don’t read you know how to do Twitter conversations or this or that it’s like no no no it doesn’t matter what platform use if you know how to write good headlines. You can use any platform if you know how to you know tell a story that appeals to those pain points and persuasion tactics. And it’s not me it’s manipulative. It’s human psychology and so I got so much of an education and working with Jason as well as understanding Facebook advertising and stuff. But like Jackie I don’t want to I don’t want to focus every day on my ads converting on this. I would rather go create content. Right. I’d rather do that. And so like with this e-mail thing with Ben, fast forward, I probably subscribed to his site for a good year before I bought from him. And he has a monthly print newsletter subscription which is where John I got the idea. It’s $97. It’s called e-mail players. He sends one e-mail a day. It’s a story style e-mail with a link and I watched how he did this. I just I just paid attention to it and I felt like and I thought what resonates with me is what resonates with me. And that I subscribe to email players and you know and then I saw Ryan Lee and other big Internet marketers going around a long time kind of does the same thing. Because my goal is simplicity.

I’m like you know what I think funnels are good but I don’t want to do 52 funnels and up cells and down cells in this way and that way it’s like you’re going to start hurt in my head like I just I don’t want to do that. I want to have a few things that I do consistently that I do well and then I grow and I started doing the daily e-mail maybe two months ago and I called it my almost daily e-mail. I think the most I’ve hit like I hit eight or nine days it hasn’t gone out today because I had a dentist appointment this morning. But it’s got to go out. But the point is what I do with these daily e-mails is again it’s a it’s a subject and a storyline that takes a person through this path and then it’s one link. You know I’ve seen these newsletters where it’s like here’s what happened this week and here’s my podcast and here’s my post. I used to do those low click through rates low engagement these I’m not kidding you Jackie let’s say e-mail five days in one week I get two or three responses to separately from different people than what I do is I take these posts and I mean I take the e-mails and I create posts on my site and then I share them socially some leveraging. I’m all about leveraging content. I have gotten my engagement rates have gone up my affiliate income has gone because I’m redoing some products and offers. But it’s like everything has increased for me by doing this.

My writing is getting faster I’m understanding copy better and so I feel like this is one of those things we’ve heard before but it’s these small consistent actions that you do over and over and over again. And so for me like it it’s just sort of like open my eyes to a lot of other things in terms of like OK will like even take exercise. Well what if you just walk for 30 minutes a day or what if you just drink two more glasses of water. It’s those little things and it’s it’s made a huge difference. I feel like I went 12 ways sideways on that but you know the whole the whole marketing piece where people get stuck I kid you not. The best way is simply to share like talk about why you wanted to start the podcast. You can do a whole post series Jackie and why you wanted to do this. And and the fact that you had a conversation yesterday here’s a great example I one of my e-mails. That was a post that got a lot of connection engagement. A friend is in a private Facebook group for a course that she purchased from a female internet marketer on webinars. OK. And somebody wrote in this Facebook group and they were like here’s some free pain points for all your internet marketers for your next sales copy. And she kind of ranted. I’m tired of investing in courses to find out I need to buy 12 pieces of software. I’m tired of spending all day at my computer doing this I’m tired of this and had a real frustration point. I’m tired of working every day all day for 10 weeks and having nothing to offer anybody, you know.

And so she was just sharing this with me and I’m like this is going to be really good email tomorrow and I try to even think where I linked back to it. I think I’m linked back to an old podcast episode of my own. But the point was I simply had a conversation with people in the email and the subject line was would you give your business more than 10 weeks to succeed because on one hand I feel her pain. Right. We’ve all been there where you get frustrated and it’s like you buy something that’s like oh now I have to go get lead pages and convertkit and all these other things. I’m not recommending either of those. One way or the other but. And if it if you’ve not been in this a long time you don’t know why I can use this or I can use this or I can use this or I can do this and that. And so I totally get that frustration. On the other hand where off line do you think that you’re going to start a business and 10 weeks be profitable you know. So it’s a different space. You have to you have to put in the time and energy. And I hate the whole do the work right. I mean I think that’s ridiculous. We all know businesses work. We all have to put in our time and energy. Some things are going to be easy some things can be hard but I am anti-hustle like there is a balance to life.

You know some days if I get inspired to do something I can work crazy hours like five or six days and then crash and then I’m like I unplug for three but that’s my own process. You know not everybody is going to do that. And I think you know life has to be lived. I refuse to skip a family birthday or I refuse to say no to breakfast or lunch with a friend that’s why I do this right. I refuse to not take a nap if I hit a wall in the afternoon I’m like. Stop telling me to hustle.

So even if if you are doing WordPress sites and maybe you’re you know you do everything in Beaver Builder or whatever the case is cases share the client story every single client could be a content like a case study part one part two part three whatever just the project what it’s about when you’re talking about and and maybe some frustrations that the client had. Here’s an example I’ve got somebody that I sent a proposal to months ago and they’ve come back like they still haven’t done anything but I think they’re ready and they’re like well you know we love the sites you sent. Can we see some more work. We want something really original but at the end it’s like yeah absolutely. Keep in mind that what I’ve sent you is what the client requested. Right. And not just that but to be able to have this conversation with someone saying your site needs to look good absolutely but it needs to convert if it’s not user friendly if it’s not converting it it’s not going to use subscribers and customers then it doesn’t matter how pretty it is because sometimes those really out of the box let’s be different isn’t user friendly and usability and functionality is key. Right? And so that is all a post if I want to you know I’m saying so it’s sharing those stories. I had another person today that I have sort of like this little small outsourcing company that I developed accidentally and I started building a team and I started doing coaching and then a lot of the coaching clients were like well hey I want to so it just sort of I fell into it anyways. It’s not something I’m like growing or marketing or anything.

Somebody has been with me for a few years and you know she reached out and it was done on a retainer basis because I had to build a plan for expenses and salaries and all that. And I’m not just doing it out of the good of my heart. It needs to be profitable to me too. Right? So this person has been using the team. I don’t know three years or something and you know can I switch to hourly from the retainer. And she has asked me because you know you know I’ve paid this much and haven’t. And I said yeah that’s totally fine because for me like I’m seriously thinking let’s just close it down early next year. Just all keep a designer and developer for myself. And I said yeah that’s fine. So then she requested well you know can I get a credit for some of the hours not used. And my initial response so I didn’t say anything and she said did you get the email and I said I did I’m thinking about it. So then I get another e-mail that says well here’s some food for thought I spent this much I did it. And I was like well now you’re getting nothing because first of all your lack of business isn’t my responsibility. You know that would be like me going to the gym and saying I haven’t been here in three months so can I get the next three months free like. That’s nonsense. And so you better believe that’s going to show up as an e-mail in a post.

And it was an amazing experience. I learned the value of charging more. I learned to that’s when I started getting to Facebook advertising a few years ago. I learned a lot. I would you know I was hanging around people that were that could make six figures on a webinar. And I’m not saying that that’s the end all be all. Like for me it was like I kind of went to the extreme of how all of this I had these great adventures we traveled and then I’ve come back to what works for me. And so that’s where with John and I with this other podcast it’s we’re rebranded it. That’s a whole long story. It was Freedom Papers it’s going to Hustle Free podcast.

I’m like I can’t work harder.

Long story short there was a farmer and it was like you know a farmer in like Persia or something and he had heard there was diamonds to be mined. And so he starts mining and he had a very profitable successful farm at the time. So he leaves his farm to go mine diamonds mined diamonds and then a long story short he spends all of his time and energy as farm miles apart and he loses money and lo and behold there were quote unquote acres of diamonds on his own farm. He just didn’t mind where he was right. We have a tendency to look out. So the moral is don’t look outside of yourself necessarily. And so when people start looking at their businesses that’s right I say what is it you’re sitting on. What is it you already do you know if you have if you are in client services put together a 10 step process for whatever and you don’t have to get into listicles necessarily. You know I’m just throwing stuff out there. But here’s a great example.

Everything in this is going to sound esoteric. How can you quantify this but everything I do that makes me happiest brings me the biggest ROI. And let me tell you like the podcast right. So much has come from this that that has blown my mind. I talk a lot about look at I fell in love with Genesis and figured out how to use it just as a user. And it was profitable or like Thrive when I found the Thrive Content builder and there are a lot of people at home and it’s you know it’s hard to use whatever but it was the first visual builder I came across a couple of years ago and all I could see was the opportunity to buy a plugin once and not have to do monthly recurring for landing pages which at the time I had Lead Pages on, I got click funnels and all these things and I thought this is amazing. And I just share things I am excited about. Do you know how much swag I get Jackie from something like Co-Schedule. I got a whole Co-Schedule thing because I friggin love it. I need to do like an epic post on them. And so when I share something that has made my life easier is fun or makes me happy. Like it’s an it’s a natural progression and then it’s profitable for me. Like Thrive is easily my highest affiliate every month because I love to create content and so then I thought OK. So here’s a great example of mining Acres of Diamonds.

I get great comments on Thrive. I also use Beaver Builder. I did a whole Thrive Content Builder and Beaver Builder why I used both. And it just it blows me away so I’ll talk about what I use when how I use it. That is it. I simply share the journey. And I thought OK so this content. Here’s the crazy thing is in doing these daily emails posting more and then I’ve gotten very good, not good – but diligent about sharing my stuff consistently thank you co-schedule. And so I’m getting a lot more traffic my bounce rate dropped like 30 percent because I’m telling more stories it’s not just throwing like WordPress tips that people and and I’m not negating that. But all of a sudden like who wants to just be another aggregated tip site. Right. And so an Acre of Diamond for me is Thrive. They have this suite of products. There are a ton of people use it so I thought OK I’m going to do it 30 days of Thrive. Right. And that’s a big a big goal because I mean publishing a piece of content every day for Thrive so it means I have to batch it but I’m willing to invest the time and energy. Now like I’ll have to go back and do like five or six ahead of time five or six ahead of time. But if I do that do you know the long term payoff of those posts are going to be because I’ll make sure they’re optimized but they will have affiliate links.

Absolutely and that I you know affiliate marketing is one of those things to me where you know I look at the fact that Pat Flynn and I both started our businesses the same air and Pat makes what 60 grand a month or something off a Bluehost. Not that I would recommend them necessarily but doing how to install a WordPress site and I dug my heels in. Oh. Everybody else has done that. I don’t want to do that. Well it’s a WordPress chick doesn’t have how to set up and install WordPress…

So again step back those fundamentals and it all worked out. I actually have interviewed Gabe Mays from GoDaddy and they’ve partnered with Beaver builder their new WordPress on-boarding for a beginner. They’re focused on being a part of the community. They’ve improved. I’m not getting paid to say this I have improved their whole WordPress manage hosting all that stuff. The point is it’s like I’m sitting here like my site is Acres of Diamonds like I get good traffic. How can I listen to people better? And so it’s having those conversations and you don’t know until you throw something out there you know like you have to simply start testing it. But look at where have you gotten the most traction. Where have you gotten comments where have you gotten the most shares. That’s where you start going. Here’s a great example.

The other one is Co-Schedule which I just adore that tool. So you go in and look at your most shared post, your most reshared content and the other than somebody that is spamming me all over Twitter with one of my posts they just keep creating new Twitter accounts because I think I listed one of their apps or something in a top five picks. But as I did a post beginning of 2015. I’m paraphrasing I was like you know the plug ins I’m using for 2015 or something. The WordPress plugins and holy moly that thing just went still to this day get shares. Should I have done it for 2016? Probably, but I thought why would I do it again? There’s not a whole lot changed so that I was thinking I’m just going to tell you this is my brain process how I was able to leverage this into like three different ways.

So then I said OK well I don’t want to redo that post. What if I did like my business stack and said it like a dev stack or marketing stack right every single tool I use in my business and we’re talking like 47 tools. It’s going to be an epic post right but I’m going to put it into a PDF that if somebody wants to just download it they’re going to have to opt in to get it. So there was that so that I took that because I remember sitting there was like a Monday and I was like OK I’m stuck What am I going to do my e-mail on and I started thinking about being stuck. And that’s when I then went to look at my data and I said oh this post. So that’s how that whole thing happened. So then from that my e-mail was the subject line was. Q The kid from a Christmas story. Have you seen that movie.

So there’s all these opportunities. So I did that. I was like OK I had this post and it was called content formatting plugins that will surprise and delight you. I started really diving into headlines and and trust me I’ll write like six headlines and the headline analyzer or the free one from co-schedule and then I’ll go optimize it and then I use something else to A/B test them. But so I thought OK and I can share this. Holy moly. I got like 20 shares in 24 hours, from a post I wrote in December of 2015 and then somebody on Facebook said I love all the content you’re sharing and I took a screenshot of that. So then that was the next day’s email. Do you see what I mean? So all I’m doing is growing I’m just putting time and energy into my business and I’m sharing what I’m doing. That is it. It’s really not rocket science. And we think that it needs to be all this big stuff. But you know like seriously you could have a whole series Jackie on you know Rethink.fm. First of all it’s an awesome name. Where did you come up with the name and why did you do it? You know what made you decide to pick the theme you did or why. Why have you chosen the guests you’ve talked to. You know there’s all these different ways to share it. And you just it resonates with people sorry. I’m really on a roll right now.

Well they’ll put out a product and then it’s gone in like six months and good luck with support. Which is a bummer because there are some good products, some good plugins and tools and web apps that come out of there but there’s so but the guys that do that it’s like they push to the next launch instead of growing and building something right. So when I find companies like Beaver builder and Thrive or whatever and they just keep getting better. Thrive just as a side note. They’re doing their whole 2.0 is going to get a whole new UI. So I’m really excited about that. But what I love about them also is that their conversion specialists are right so their blog even if you subscribe to the blog and I have all their plugins they also have this headline optimizer where you literally just can drop in a couple of extra headlines you know update the post and they will split test for you and you can pick the winner and inevitably not my original is the one that wins out. Go figure. But but so that content piece and I’m so sorry if I interrupted you but the like in sharing that because I do agree with you and it was when I saw that there’s stuff converts. So I know that if I just come from a place of here’s what I use why I use it and how I did. I spent a few weeks on this post for Thrive, it was the ultimate guide to thrive Content builder. I did four videos. I did a written post and then I did a content upgrade that I did a PTF. It was almost 30 pages on each of the different elements. So it was time consuming. Absolutely. But I did screen shots and I said so this is the countdown timer and this is when you would use it. I mean I couldn’t put in every style because it would have been like 300 pages. But but the point is so then I said hey you know there’s just a little content upgrade. And so now I’m building a list of people who are interested in thrive products. I know that right. And it’s so I will constantly reschedule that post and co-schedule. And it always gets me traffic.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Diane Kinney. She is a web designer and developer with over 17 years of experience running her own boutique agency.

We’re talking all about design and how it is evolving, responsive vs adaptive, clients, SVGs and so much more. Diane shares a wealth of knowledge and experience in this episode, that will be sure to have you rethinking something. A complete transcript of this podcast is available.

Let’s get started.

Yes, I’m a mega WordPress nerd and I’d love to share the things I’ve learned in the last 17 years of building both simple and complex sites in WordPress.

Born and raised in Wisconsin (#gopackgo), my adult life has been spent on the gulf coast of Florida in sunny Sarasota. I delight in the sunshine and weirdly wonderful things that regularly happen in this state.

I live with my husband, college student daughter, five cats and three dogs. All of the cats were rescued from certain death by my animal loving daughter and our first dog was a refugee after Hurricane Charley. It’s all very crazy and brimming with love.

Diane’s Business Website: The Versatility Group

This episode of Rethink.fm is sponsored by:

Having trouble with the business part of running a web design business?

Check out Erin E Flynn for articles, e-courses, workshops, and a friendly community to help you run your web design business like a pro!

Join the crew and become Unstoppable at erineflynn.com!

I’ve tried a few of Erin’s products. The Email Templates, Welcome Packet and Intro Packet – I highly recommend then – a great resource to help you run your web design and development business. -Jackie D’Elia

Open PDF version of this transcript

In this episode, I’m chatting with Rian Rietveld. She is a Web Accessibility expert and leads the WordPress Accessibility Team. She is my first international guest, and lives in the Netherlands.

This is a topic I’m passionate about. I finally get to ask Rian all those questions that have been floating around in my head about Web Accessibility. Rian explains why it’s important, and what we need to know. A complete transcript of this podcast is now available.

Rian is a WordPress engineer.

She has been developing for the web for over 17 years and focuses on web accessibility and usability.

She works at Human Made and leads the WordPress Accessibility Team to improve WordPress core.

Rian’s Website: http://www.rianrietveld.com
Rian’s Twitter link: Rian Rietveld

Rian also mentioned a Reader View available on most desktop browsers and mobile devices. I found the latest version of Safari has it. It is the first icon with horizontal lines in the location (URL) bar. I found an extension for Chrome called Reader View that offers that too.

Open PDF version of this transcript

Welcome to Episode 7 of Rethink.fm with Rian Rietveld. We’ll be talking about Web Accessibility today, what you need to know and why it is important. Before we get started I just like to remind you, if you’re enjoying these episodes of Rethink.fm please head over to iTunes and leave a review. It really does help and I thank you very much for doing that. Let’s get started.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Joe Casabona of WP in One Month and How I Built It. We’re chatting about front end development, having empathy and stepping into the WP education space.

Joe shares a wealth of knowledge on how he’s helping others learn WordPress and why he started his new podcast, How I Built It. There is one common thread in everything Joe does, and it is helping others. He truly has the heart of a teacher.

Joe Casabona is a Front End Developer that works in WordPress…a lot. In 2014, he authored a book called Responsive Design with WordPress and 2 other books on web development.

He also develops courses on WP in One Month and hosts the How I Built It podcast.

Check out LearnDash. Easily transform your WordPress site into a powerful learning management system using LearnDash.

Sell e-learning courses, track user progress, deliver certificates, and much more! LearnDash is trusted by major universities, million dollar marketers, training organizations, and bloggers worldwide.

Discover more at LearnDash.com

In this episode, I’m chatting with Shawn Hesketh of WP101 on how his growing business is helping designers and developers provide highly effective WordPress training for clients.

Shawn is the Voice of WordPress for so many of us. His company, WP101 produces high quality, professional videos and offers them through the WP101 plugin and at WP101.com.

Shawn shares his wealth of knowledge on producing WordPress training courses and even shares helpful tips on how to create your own screencasts.

My name is Shawn Hesketh, and for 26 years, I enjoyed a rewarding career as a freelance designer.

Over the years, I built countless WordPress sites for my clients. To get my clients up to speed as quickly as possible, I also provided one-on-one WordPress training.

But one-on-one training just isn’t feasible for everyone. So in 2008, I created a WordPress 101 video “crash course” to help beginners learn how to use WordPress in as little time as possible.

Microphones: Blue Yeti and Rode Podcaster.
Screencast Tools: Screenflow and Camtasia
Audio Enhancements: Garageband and Audacity

Shawn talks about why he chose LifterLMS for their membership course platform.

Shawn’s blog: ShawnHesketh.com

This episode may also be found on the Rethink.fm Youtube channel

In this episode, I’m chatting with Chris Ford who is leveraging her talents as a successful web designer to empower others. We discuss how her 20 years of web design experience is creating new opportunities in her career evolution.

There’s one common thread in Chris Ford’s 20 year web design career: learning new web design tools, techniques and processes, then teaching them to others.

She passionately believes that education is one of the most overlooked and underused ways to improve the user experience of a website or product.

Chris is currently in the process of rebooting Creativity Included, her design and branding company, to focus on education for both designers and product businesses.

Chris mentioned Webflow during the podcast as the tool she uses for wire-framing and mockups.

This episode is available on Youtube: Rethinkfm Episode 4.