WP Builds

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...

Interview – Should we use templates more?

Back in the good old days of the internet, when CSS was hardly a thought and nobody used JavaScript, you pretty much had to build websites from the ground up each time.

What I mean by that is that I don’t have a memory of being able to download templates for different websites that you could tweak to make your own; you just had to build them and when the next project came along you had to start all over again. Well, that’s how I did it anyway.

Fast forward into the era of WordPress (and other CMS solutions) and themes came along. You could buy websites ready made, good to go.

The promise was so beguiling – download a website theme, click a button to upload it and bam, your website would be complete and ready for consumption by the public at large. They would come to your website in their millions and marvel at your website building skills!

Mmm… No really. Most WordPress users quickly figured out that although themes were great, there was usually a whole heap of work that needed to be done to bend the theme to your will. That portfolio that you saw on the website sales page, how did it even work. Aaarrrggghhh… now I have to spend hours unpicking the code because none of this theme is as simple as it appeared to be!

Hands up if you wasted hours of your time and lots of your cash buying theme after theme hoping that this time, this theme would be the perfect fit for the client that you had lined up. Cough, my hand is practically scraping the ceiling right now!

So themes were (and are) great if:

the documentation is plentiful and readablethe theme is developed in a standard wayyou have enough patience to work through the problems that you will encounter

Well, things move on and now we have entered an era of frameworks and minimal themes that just get you started, but don’t try to do ‘all the things’. Add into the mix the proliferation of the many Page Builders in the WordPress space and now we seem to be in an era where Page Builder modules do the job of styling the site more and more.

Now almost anyone can create a great looking site in a few days and save their templates to be reused another time. Or perhaps you could just used the page templates and modules that come with the Page Builder. Or (another or…) you could get hold of third-party templates and use those instead.

Times have changed!

My work is more and more focussing upon doing almost everything in the browser. WordPress, Page Builder, templates, theme, image creation, wireframes, information architecture can all be done with online tools.

So with all of this available, do we actually need any skills to build websites anymore? Could we hand the work to a child and say… “there you go, I want a site in a couple of days”? In short – NO!

You still need skills to be able to create websites and you need to offer value to the client in other ways too – funnels, integrations, SEO and all that jazz!

We also need to think about whether or not duplicating pre-made templates and just using those all over our website is doing the client a service. Are we in danger of falling into the trap of making life so easy for us as WordPress website developers that the clients all end up with cookie cutter websites with zero individuality.

Perhaps we should use templates for inspiration for our websites. Use the ideas that we see and then create our own template library that fits in with what we do and what our clients require. That sounds like a good compromise I think, Doesn’t it?

So create your own templates, keep them updated and we’ll come back to this topic again in a future when the landscape has completely changed again!

Mentioned in this episode:

ElementorBeaver Builder / Beaver ThemerBrizyPage Builder CloudKatka template packHack the Buyer Brain

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 2nd September 2019

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 2nd September 2019:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.2.3 Security and Maintenance Release

WordPress 5.3 Will Change How it Blocks Indexingand this

Anders Norén to Design Twenty Twenty Default Theme, Shipping in WordPress 5.3

Community

WordPress Governance Project Looks for New Leadership

WordSesh EMEA Schedule Published, Registration Opens September 9

Celebrating the WordPress community: the Yoast Care fund

Plugins / Themes

New! Make WordPress Security Easy With Passwordless Logins

Ultimate Dashboard – Contact Form Widget

Oxygen 3.0 Now Available

Toolbelt: A New Jetpack-Inspired Plugin with a Focus on Speed and Privacy

Toolset Types 3.3.5 Brings a Public Custom Field API

Elementor: Monthly Template Kit #2: Build a Beautiful Fitness Website

Deals from this week

10% off ‘UX for Everyone’ – code WPBUILDSROCKS before the 11th September 2019

Security

The WordPress 5.2.3 Security Release Unpacked

WordPress sites are being backdoored with rogue admin users

WP Builds

Get paid with likes… the Like Coin with Kin Ko

Monthly UI / UX Website Reviews with Piccia Nerri

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Podcasts Are Getting Attacked With Negative Reviews With No Help in Sight

NetNewsWire 5.0 RSS Reader Rebuilt from Scratch, Now Free and Open Source

Google Research: 55% of Consumers Use Videos for Purchase Decisions

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...

Interview – Get paid with likes… the Like Coin

So we’ve all heard of the Block Chain I guess by now? It’s a technology which has received a great deal of interest over the last few years, well, that’s what this episode is about – sort of!

Although my understanding is not all that clear, a Block Chain is a distributed ledger which holds data about something… anything. A few years ago when the idea came about, it was all about crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Etherium. That’s changing now as people are figuring out that this system can be repurposed to store data about anything.

The reason that it’s so innovative is that Block Chains can be used as proof that something happened. The ecosystem has to agree that an event happened before it’s added to the chain of other blocks. Thus you can prove that you did in fact earn that Bitcoin. Everyone has a copy of the data, not just one person in the way that we usually store data (backups excluded).

Click here to give WP Builds some Like Coins!

Today we speak with Kin Ko who has come up with the most interesting of ideas… The Like Coin.

Think of it like this. You are a browser of the internet and you consume other people’s content all the time. A few decades ago you’d have had to pay for all that content one piece at a time. They book, that magazine, that newspaper. Then along came the internet and changed that for good. Now most of us expect it all for free.

However, it cannot be free – no all of it. Some people will gladly give away their content for nothing, they just post it and expect nothing in return. Others really wish to get paid for their work and so the industry has tried all sorts of ways to create financial value from content. Ads, paywalls, donations, subscriptions. They all work to a great (or more likely) lesser extent, but they’re not perfect.

Like coin is aiming to change that. You see the idea here is that you get hold of some like coins and then you give them away. Just like real money!

If Like Coin is successful, website owners will start to put Like Coin ‘Like’ buttons on their websites… like this one…

Click here to give WP Builds some Like Coins!

This is not the proper one, rather just a link, but it does the same job. If you see my content and you think that it’s worth something, you just click the button wherever you think the content is worthy.

So let’s say that you sign up to Like Coin to the order of $10 per month. You $10 will become Like Coins and each time you click a Like button, the owner of that website will get a proportion of that $10. If you make one click during that month, that person gets $10 value. If you click twice, they both get $5 value. You get the idea.

So this enables you to donate and not have to think too much about the value you put on it. You just merrily click away know that the system will distribute your donations equally! It’s so clever.

Now, clearly, there is more to it than that, but you get the idea. Listen to the podcast to find out all the details and perhaps start a revolution at the same time!

Mentioned in this episode:

What is Like CoinHow to enable LikeButton on WordPress Websiteemail Kin: [email protected]

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 26th August 2019

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 26th August 2019:

WordPress Core

Gutenberg 6.4 Adds New Typewriter Experience, Cover Block Resizing, and Block Inserter Help Panel

Community

Elementor Growth Roundup – 15 Experts Share How to Grow Your Business in 2020

Why WordPress is a Superior Platform for a Non-Profit Organization

Is WordPress An Actual Content Management System (CMS)?

Wix to WordPress Migration — A Step-by-Step Guide Using Elementor

Plugins / Themes

40% off Project Huddle including lifetime deal at $299

FacetWP 3.4.1

10 Best Blocks To Use For Creating Your Site With Gutenberg

Security

What is xmlrpc.php file and why you should care about it

Malicious WordPress Redirect Campaign Attacking Several Plugins

How to Password Protect Your WordPress Site: Every Method

How to Stop a DDoS Attack

WP Builds

Only doing what you’re good at

Let Piccia Neri review your website’s UI / UX

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Micro.blog Adds Tumblr Cross-Posting

Google’s Danny Sullivan Responds Directly to DuckDuckGo’s Anti-Privacy Claims

Chrome 76 Adds Native Lazy-Loading, WordPress Contributors Continue Discussion Regarding Core Support

php Central Europe Conference Canceled Due to Lack of Speaker Diversity

Facebook Rolls Out Automated Lead Generation in Messenger

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...

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...