Hello, Sally Strebel here. I’m the COO and Co-founder of the first managed WordPress hosting company, Pagely. I’d like to share with you our outstanding accomplishments from the year and our grand plans for 2019. As a client, employee, or window shopper, you’ll remember why you chose Pagely. What We Accomplished in 2018 ARES This year we rolled out ARES, Pagely’s application gateway which provides high-level, secure network system communication. It handles routing, intelligent caching/acceleration, security, and configuration flexibility. For our customers, it means we’re able to create a completely custom hosting environment for them with more flexible configurations and stronger security posture – something other companies can’t manage. GDPR – Privacy Pagely is walking the walk better than an average US organization by joining the EU/US Privacy Shield (and Swiss Privacy Shield). We value and respect our customers’ privacy and our customers’ customers’ privacy which is why we worked so hard in 2018 to meet our obligations under the new GDPR legal framework and addressed the data privacy and GDRP concerns of our clients. We are happy to note we completed our work several weeks for before the deadline. New Atomic Dashboard We revamped our Atomic Control Panel giving clients parity with the old Atomic while providing analytics via PressFormance, 2FA, SSL (Let’s Encrypt) and SSH management, CDN enhancements, new user sign-up flows, and general UI/UX improvements. Adaptive Video Our Director of Sales developed a “choose your own” sales adventure, which we affectionately refer to as Bottled Beard. It’s already receiving accolades and some copycats. Here’s how he did it. Amazon Web Services Partnership Our deepening relationship and competency with AWS publicly demonstrates our technological leadership and brings the full capabilities of AWS to our customer base. We’re also now live in the AWS Marketplace. Pagely is an Advanced Technology Partner of AWS. With thousands of EC2 instances under management for our clients we continually preform upgrades to the entire fleet. In 2018, the seamless EC2 upgrades from c4 to c4/c5d meant all clients benefited from faster and more robust hardware with no customer action required. Our CTO, Joshua Eichorn, was invited to speak at the massive AWS ReInvent conference this November on the topic of Aurora Serverless. Team Coaching Although we have directors and C-level execs, we think titles are a bit silly. Our focus in 2018 was to offer coaching level support to all of our employees, spreading as much knowledge to each other as possible. Scholarships We value education, continued learning, and building something better. This year we launched our first financial scholarship program to support students doing incredible things. InfoSec the WordPress Our security team provides unique coverage for our clients and the WordPress community at large. Although our Pagely clients greatly benefit directly from our efforts, it’s hard to see the larger community go unprotected during critical times. This year our Director of Security and Privacy, Robert Rowley, chose to join the the WordPress Core security team to make transparency and collaboration with the greater ecosystem a priority. PressThumb PressThumb was on our secret menu for a while but we opened it up to all of our VPS and above clients. On the fly image optimization available for all client sites. The Pagely Family I feel blessed every day to be able to work with the Pagely family. In October I was interviewed by Joyce Rosenberg of the Associated Press, about women business owners fighting gender bias, and the article was syndicated by over 1000 publications including NYT, Washington Post, and INC. One of the questions she asked me was, “Who are my mentors?” I had to think about this. I’ve met very successful people with great advice, but what my mind landed on is that my mentors are now my work family. The Pagely team is full of the brightest minds and the hardest working people I know. They know their fields better than anyone, they are on the front lines, and their drive for excellence is unparalleled. They take ownership in Pagely and it’s not just a workplace to everyone here. It is a commitment to providing and creating the best hosting company in the world. Since we were the first to understand the need for managed WordPress hosting, we are thrilled to share with you the next revolution in the industry. Coming Soon in 2019 Advances in Pressformance and Monitoring Our growing Amazon partnership will allow us to implement and work behind the scenes with AWS to give you first access to the latest and greatest technology as soon as it’s available. NorthStack: Serverless Web Hosting We started Pagely because the hosting industry wasn’t best serving the needs of the market. Remember being locked into long contracts? Calling for help only to receive an upsell? Being told it was a one-click install but they didn’t tell you about the other 11 time consuming steps? That was pre-Pagely. Well, we believe there is still a better way with room to evolve and innovate. Pagely is perfect for clients who need the most resilient and performant hosting platform with white glove service… however we are financially out of reach of many more that could benefit from our expertise. Enter NorthStack, our technical masterpiece for developers and agencies featuring an economical pay-as-you-go model. NorthStack is an elastic, autoscaling, serverless platform for hosting WordPress, Node, Laravel, and static sites. WordPress users can now build and run dynamic, interactive websites with plugins in a scalable, pay-as-you-go environment. We’re, once again, changing the game and we’re thrilled to see where things go in 2019. Our Holiday Hours As always, please let us know of major changes to your sites such as launches, deployments, etc., as soon as possible, so we can properly assist you. We’re all taking some time to recharge so we can come back in 2019 better than ever to help you reach your goals for the year. For more info on our hours go here. What Our Clients Are Saying “Knowing that the Pagely team is there for us 24/7 has been invaluable, not to mention the reliability and visibility they provide. These have been extremely important factors in helping us meet our marketing needs for NGINX.com.” – Alice Oh Website Manager – NGINX Read the NGINX Case Study “Pagely is on a different level: they’re VIP concierge treatment. Pagely is the ideal hosting partner because you feel like you know the people you’re working with.” – Jeff Matson Documentation Lead – Gravity Forms Read the Gravity Forms Case Study “Everything was right about Pagely. We knew the team would do a good job, and the service fulfilled all the right criteria. All in all, we’ve been incredibly happy with our decision. The Pagely team has exceeded our expectations and we’re looking forward to continuing our relationship with their team.” – Karoline Hassfurter Communications Officer – UNICEF Read the UNICEF Case Study
A brief update on our dedication to you. I’m Sally Strebel, the co-founder and COO of the first managed WordPress hosting company: Pagely. I have a lot of passion for this company and for the people I work with every day. That includes teammates and clients. As a team, we sometimes wonder if we communicate to our clients too much or not enough. It’s a balancing act between “if our clients don’t hear from us, then they know we are doing our job and they can focus on their business” and “if our clients don’t hear from us, will they know the value and work that we are providing everyday?”. We have fallen victim to our good manners. In our attempts to respect everyones time, we have not tooted our own horn enough to let you know how truly badass we are. Today, that changes. Pagely is not an ordinary hosting company. Ask any of our highly skilled teammates, brand ambassadors, or agency partners and they’ll make these points: We tackle the biggest problems that WordPress faces. We identify security vulnerabilities in the WordPress stack that we responsibly disclose, assist the code authors with fixes, outright patch. Since we really do scale WordPress (and not just say we do for marketing purposes), we have broken many common Plugins and themes under load and assisted the authors by providing more performant code. To the direct benefit of our clients we contact, share, patch, and provide solutions for the greater good of all who use WordPress. We do not merely throw more hardware at a problem site as the first answer (aren’t we all tired of upsell-mania?), but work closely with the customer to diagnose the root cause (it’s always the code) and then recommend a change or often times, fix it right then. We attempt to save our clients money if a new technology provides a better outcome. We want to be your partner not just a hosting company. Think of us as an extension of your team. Let us know if you think your site is running slow. We’ll diagnose and give you the information to get tuned up for domination. Let us know if you’re expecting a huge amount of traffic on a particular day. We’ll quickly scale you up and scale you back down as needed. You should enjoy your success and not worry if your site can handle it. If you ever wonder if we are truly awesome let me assure you, we care about your success. When you have a bad day, we hurt too. It is our goal to think of your up time, and future up time, along with assuring you that you have made an excellent choice in Pagely as a partner. We are here to serve. Let me know how I can help. I’m always just an email away at sally@pagely.com. Features Coming in 2018 Coming Now: An all new Status Page giving up to the minute details on our systems health. Coming Now: In our mission to offer an even more stellar experience, we are updating our onboarding process for new clients. It includes: What to expect during migration documentation An informative onboarding video The do’s and don’ts of Pagely An update to our staging platform, and more concise documentation. Flexibility rules! Our new partnerships with load testing companies to help you uncover bottlenecks prior to launch. (Formal announcement coming soon) More concise “Go Live” instructions If you would like this information, let me know. It’s great for new admins for existing sites as well. I’m happy to share. Coming Now: PROJECT: FLYING ORCA (It’s a codename, look for formal announcement soon) is our next generation NGINX/Lua based Application Gateway. It’s even faster and better performing than commercial versions of popular web servers. Several live sites/clients are helping us with the final testing prior to a system wide roll-out. Coming Soon: The New Atomic Dashboard will have an all new react.js powered interface in front of an entirely new PHP micro-service backend. Yes, we totally rebuilt the plane while flying it full of passengers and cargo on a trans-pacific route. It includes: Totally automated and self managed SSL with Let’s Encrypt Support A much smoother TEAM collaborator experiance Integrated PressFORMANCE™ performance and security analytics Intuitive staging and clone tools New Atomic will roll out in stages as we bring this up to total parity with the legacy system. We are targeting Feb 1 for launch. Also coming a bit later under the PressFORMANCE heading: Website Performance Trend Analysis leveraging machine learning/AI that paints a wholistic picture of your sites baseline trend and if that baseline deviates outside of a defined range we’ll be alerted and quickly able to identify the change that caused the issue. “Your team solves problems that other hosts struggle to even diagnose” is one of my favorite testimonials that we have received. This trend reporting takes traditional reporting one step farther by speeding up our diagnoses. Since many of our client’s sites see massive traffic, we are finding problems in WordPress stack components that most hosts never have to deal with. With increased alerting speed comes faster fixes. We can determine if problems are caused by a recent code deployment, a change in plugin/theme, abnormal traffic patterns, etc. This will also allow us to provide monthly stats with recommendations for improvement. These recommendations will come with an uptime urgency indicator. In other words, things that need to be addressed now for uptime, and things that my affect your uptime in the future. Interesting: ServerLess WordPress. Our deep partnership with AWS is driving a few interesting projects in our laboratory. Our Holiday Hours Our Pagely team is like having a second family. One of our important company values is to live a balanced life and have something going on outside of work. That is why we have light work days during the holidays. Please let us know of major changes to your sites such as launches, deployments, etc… as soon as possible, before the holidays, so we can properly assist you. Our hope is that our light work days will help you have some light work days too so you can spend time with your loved ones with less stress. Once holidays are over, we’ll be back to 110%, fully rested, and ready to help you reach your goals. For more info on our hours go here. What Our Clients are Saying Read the Zenefits case study. Read the City of Boston case study. Read the UNICEF case study.
In this edition of WP Heavy Hitters we are proud to showcase Andrew Norcross. Andrew is a good hearted, trend setter. Don’t let his quiet demeanor fool you because when he talks and shares info, people listen. Andrew won Pagely’s grand Birthday prize and will enjoy a trip to WordCamp San Diego on us. His brilliant mind uncovered the identity of our infamous support tech, El Furioso and will be part of the posse rolling into SD. If you’re at WordCamp SD be sure to say hello. Andrew Norcross Tag line: “Full of piss and vinegar. And coffee. Lots of coffee.” Knock Outs: Reaktiv Studios, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc, WordCamp speaker, Dad, Themes, Plugins, Tutorials Power Move: Jedi Mind Trick – Always remain calm and collected, but I will make it happen. Training Facilities: Reaktiv Studios BlueGlass Interactive, Inc WordCamp speaker Dad Themes Plugins Tutorials When and why did you start working with WordPress? I had installed a server on an old computer. I had initially installed Movable Type, but found it horrible to work with. So I installed WP, having never touched a line of PHP in my life. It all went from there. Did favors for friends while I worked in banking / finance, then started doing a bit of side work here and there to help pay the bills when my son was born. Soon enough I was able to ditch finance completely and make a go of this. You run a firm called Reaktiv Studios. Are you passionate about client service? Why and why not? I am passionate about building awesome things. Themes, plugins, or whathave you. While I certainly don’t enjoy pissing clients off, I’ll be the first to admit that dealing with people isn’t my strong suit. I’ve had a VA for about a year and a half who handles most of the client interaction, and for good reason. She’s much better at it than I am. You seem to be more of a Thesis man than a Genesis guy. Why the preference? When I started getting a decend hand on this stuff, Genesis didn’t exist yet, so there wasn’t much of a decision to make. Thesis was the only framework at the time that I found useful (there were others, but they didn’t make as much sense to me). I’m still partial to Thesis because the development methodology matches how I prefer to do things, although I do a decent amount of Genesis builds as well. I’m framework agnostic, though. I use whatever tool fits the job. I still “roll my own” about 50% of the time, esp for complex sites (ecommerce and BuddyPress mainly). How many languages can you code in? Which do you find one superior and why? I code in PHP, and I know a bit of javascript / jQuery (obviously HTML / CSS, but those don’t count). I’ve always wanted to get my hands dirty in other languages, but alas I haven’t had the time. Any SEO tidbits you’d like to share? Other than keep the site design clean and fast, my SEO advice is always to hire a professional if it’s something that really matters. You’ve developed many plugins. Which do you think is most useful? Based on usage, the FAQ Manager is probably the most useful. It’s a pretty common need on business sites, and using it allows the user to keep the content better organized and let the area grow as needed. You speak and attend many WordCamps. What’s your favorite topic to talk about and why? It really depends on the crowd. The talk I gave in Boston on dealing with clients had nothing (directly) WordPress related, but I got a lot of awesome feedback from it. Beyond that, I enjoy going over topics that other developers would find helpful moreso than general users. I know that for myself, I sometimes get stuck in doing things a certain way and when another dev points something out that makes my life easier, I’m always appreciative. You have many tattoos. Do you have a favorite and what does it mean to you? This is gonna sound bad (for some people), but my tattoos don’t have any deep-seeded meaning. They’re as much for the art than anything else. Although, the eagle / anchor I got in my grandfather’s memory is probably my favorite. Is there something that your grandfather taught you that you use daily in your work/ life? Actually, yes. Two things. 1. The world doesn’t owe you anything. It was here first. 2. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re in for a long, lonely life. How do you balance work with being a parent? It’s hard. God damn it’s hard. Its easy to get lost in a project and forget that there’s another world other than my screen. One of the biggest adjustments was coming to terms with the fact that my kids (ages 7, 4, and 4) don’t give a shit what time I went to bed, or if I have a code problem rolling around in my head. So I’ve gotten much better at walking away from my work when it’s time for family. We all eat dinner together every night, and I make it a point to spend time with each of them individually just so they don’t feel as though I’m not a part of their lives. Even though they drive me insane, my kids mean more to me than anything. What makes WordPress so bad ass? The fact that it can basically do anything, if you’re willing to think it through and build it. I’ve put together sites that folks never believed were WP, because their function was outside the normal blog / site scope. Photo managers, a CRM, a digital “business card” just to name a few. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? I see it becoming more refined and more “modular” in nature. Custom Post Types and Taxonomies did a lot for that, allowing people to build features that do and act how they want, without having to ‘work around’ existing structure. Beyond that, I think the sky’s the limit. Thanks Andrew for allowing me to showcase your valuable WordPress contributions. See you in San Diego.
Editor’s Note: This post is from our archives, and not all content is still relevant. For a fresh look at our company & tech, we recommend these sections: Our Managed WordPress Hosting Service Articles on WordPress for Business Industry-specific Hosting Solutions In this edition of WP Heavy Hitters we are proud to showcase Sara Cannon. Sara is very creative, humble, sweet, and altruistic. When I asked if I could interview her, she said “Sure, but I think you should write abou Sara Cannon Tag line: “Life is Short, Art is Long, Typography is Everything.” Knock Outs: Artist, Graphic Designer and WordPress developer, WordCamp Speaker, Bham WordPress Meetup Organizer, and Core Contributor Power Move: The Ninja. I quietly approach and then surprise you with my mad skills. Training Facilities: Sara Cannon, Scout Branding Company, Dribble, When and why did you start working with WordPress? I started working with WordPress in the fall of 2007. I studied some web design in college and had experimented with setting up a site for a non-profit and it just wasn’t working like I wanted it to. I did some googling and stumbled upon WordPress. To test it out, I started my own blog & I’ve been hooked ever since. You’re a designer and a programmer. What caused the pairing? I went to school for art & design, but the big world of technology has always sparked my interest. I love how things evolve quickly, and how you have to be on-top-of-your-game in order not to get behind. The aesthetics mixed with -and visualized by- code is very intriguing to me. But I think what hit the nail on the head for me was how challenging programming was (and still is!) for me. I’m always up for a challenge. It is also why I decided to start speaking: because terrified me. You speak at many WordCamps. What is your favorite topic to speak on? I love design, typography, and WordPress so the intersection those things is where you can find my passion. If I can somehow inspire people to push the boundaries of the typical & make it beautiful, while using WordPress, I feel accomplished. Explain the passion that you have for typography. “Web Design is 95% Typography.” – Information Architects That statement was true even before web-fonts! Type is a voice, canvas, mood, interface, CONTENT. There are so many elements that are important to web design, but typography can make or break it. It is so important and therefore should be studied, observed, and every detail paid attention to. People tend to think I’m a little crazy because of how meticulous I am about how web type is executed and rendered. Here is an example of interaction I had during my typography session at WordCamp NYC: person: “so, you really test, target, and tweak your type on every browser on different platforms / devices?” me: “yes, of course.” person: “isn’t that a little insane? I mean.. does it really matter?” me: “::gasp:: are you kidding me? Of course it matters! Typography is everything.” What is your favorite CSS trick? Lately I’ve been digging real hard on media queries! I love being able to tweak and customize my site for an iPad or a mobile device from my main CSS file. Which WordCamp has been your most memorable? WordCamp San Francisco in May 2010 was very memorable for me. It was the first WC that I went to outside the southeast. I was able to soak in the awesomeness that was all the incredibly talented speakers there, learn tons, and meet people outside of my community that have the same passions that I do, and make some lasting friendships. It really opened my eyes to the multitude of people there are around the world who love WordPress and the true impact that it has globally. How do you manage WordCamps, Art, and client work? In one sentence: I love what I do. Don’t get me wrong, working for clients is hard work and I am always very very busy. But the community surrounding WordPress makes it all worth it. At the end of a WordCamp, there is nothing better than going to have a drink with everyone else that has been working so hard and saying a cheers to the GPL. As for Art: It’s more of a life-force than something that is draining. My best client work is done when I am also making artwork around that period. There seems to be a creative correlation between the two. I’d encourage anyone that is having trouble working out a design for a client to take a break and make some art. Its all related. Scout has won many awards. Which awards give you the greatest satisfaction? Scout has so many talented people working here! Collaborating with them is an incredibly rewarding experience. One of my favorite projects is the one where I designed and developed a charitable giving website for a law firm using WordPress. It won a silver ADDY this year. It wasn’t so much the award that gave me satisfaction, but the fact that I was able to build a site using WordPress where people can give back to their community. I would love to have more projects like that! I’m also really really excited about some sites that we are about to launch here pretty soon. In your biography you listed artist first. Was that on purpose or alphabetical filing? Being an artist is really the most important thing for me. It seems like everything else that I do in my life is some sort of derivative of that. After all, “Code is Poetry.” Who is your favorite artist and why? You’re allowing me to geek out here! Currently, my current favorite living artist is Olafur Eliasson. I am moved by most anything that bridges math/science with beauty/aesthetics. (code/design!) In some of his works, he can basically takes a space full of nothing, and turns it into this beautiful calculated abstraction of physics/science/math. Its magical, beautiful, and makes my heart melt. Tell us about contributing to WordPress Core and your Blue Admin Theme I had the great privilege this year of working with the UI Group and Contributing to the 3.1 release. I was able to dig deep into the core CSS and help craft the Blue Admin Theme. Contributing that work and getting involved with WordPress Core has been an incredible experience. I encourage anyone to do so. Giving back to what you use and what sustains you is so rewarding. And, of course, I also encourage Blue Admin Theme use 😉 What makes WordPress so bad ass? FOSS. GPL. OMG. FTW. I love that WordPress is for everyone, anyone can contribute back to it, it is free, it gives people a voice in places where they normally wont have one, its global. I love that it can do anything. I love being able to contribute to core via the UI group. I feel like I’m a part of something and all the people that are involved with it are incredibly talented and I learn from them daily. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? I see it’s magical CMS powers increasing and it further spanning the globe to power more and more sites. Thanks Sara for taking the time. I look forward to seeing you at the next WordCamp. 😉
In this edition of our WordPress Heavy Hitters series we are proud to feature Brad Williams. In addition to his uber awesome WordPress skills and list of impressive clients, he also has formed a team that is rock solid. We are honored to call Brad a friend and share some of his story with you. Brad Williams Tag line: There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t Knock Outs: WebDevStudios.com, Co-Author of “Professional WordPress Design and Development” and “Professional WordPress Plugin Development” (coming soon), Co-Host of the SitePoint Podcast, founder of Pluginize.com Power Move: Kill foot (Marine Corps, YUUUUT!) Training Facilities: WebDevStudios.com, SitePoint Podcast, Pluginize.com, Professional WordPress Design and Development You work with numerous open source software packages. Which one is your favorite and why? WordPress of course! When WDS first started we worked with numerous open source platforms including Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, and others. We’ve since narrowed our focus and do about 99% of our work in WordPress. It really came down to what our clients found easiest to use, and what we found the best to develop in, and WordPress was the perfect fit. How did you start working with WordPress? My first experience with WordPress was setting up my blog, strangework.com, back in 2006. I’ve been programming for as long as I can remember so of course my first instinct was to dive into the code and learn it inside and out, so that’s what I did! At the time I was strictly a Microsoft technology developer specializing in ASP.NET and classic ASP with SQL Server, so PHP and MySQL were new territory for me. I’ve always loved classic ASP, which is a scripting language just like PHP, so it was a natural fit. I was hooked and now work almost exclusively in PHP and MySQL. You speak at many WordCamps. What is your favorite topic to speak on? I actually really enjoy speaking on topics that I haven’t spoke on before. There’s no better way to learn a new topic inside and out than to speak on it! WordPress Security is probably what I’m best known for, but actually my custom post types and taxonomies presentation from WordCamp Raleigh is my most viewed presentation on Slideshare.net (http://slideshare.net/williamsba). What are the 3 must do’s for WordPress security? 1. Use a solid host. You get what you pay for so don’t get mad if you are hacked paying $5/month for hosting 2. Don’t use the admin username. Most dictionary attacks that try to guess your password assume a username of admin exists. If admin does exist, they’ve just won half the battle 3. Use secure passwords. This is the most obvious, and probably the most overlooked, security tip there is. Always use a very secure password, including numbers and special characters, to prevent dictionary attacks Which WordCamp has been your most memorable? I would have to say WordCamp Philly, since I was one of the organizers. Attending a WordCamp and organizing a WordCamp are two VERY different experiences. I was lucky enough to work with two awesome co-organizers, and together we put together an amazing event! As an attendee I would have to say WordCamp Raleigh. I was on stage for about 5 hours during that event for various presentations, panels, and the live SitePoint podcast. The event was organized by an amazing group of people and I had a really great time. How did you get involved with SitePoint’s podcast? I’ve been a member of the SitePoint forums since 2000, over 10 years now (insane!). I learned a good majority of my programming skills in those forums. During that time I was promoted to Moderator, and eventually Advisor, of the SitePoint forums. I eventually raised the topic of starting a SitePoint podcast and the rest is history. In fact we just won Podcast of the Year from the .Net Magazine awards! Please explain your writing process and who your book will help. My writing process is probably not the most traditional. I typically fire up some 90s gangsta rap and write away! There’s something about old school rap that gets my writing juices flowing. The WordPress books I’ve written are a part of the WROX programmer to programmer series. These books are written by developers for developers. They are not for beginning users in WordPress, but rather people looking to take the next step in learning how to develop amazing websites and plugins in WordPress. Honestly there is something for everyone, from the beginning developer to the seasoned professional, we cover it all! With the new book, Professional WordPress Plugin Development, we brought in the heavy hitters. Ozh Richard and Justin Tadlock are two of the most recognized WordPress developers and tutorial writers out there. Their knowledge is unmatched and the experience and knowledge they bring to the book is simply amazing. We’re covering topics that have never been in print before, everything from custom post types and taxonomies, to users and roles, working with cron and scheduling events, and even the rewrite API. We even have an entire chapter dedicated to the Multisite feature in WordPress. All in all this book will be the definitive resource for WordPress plugin development for many years to comes! How has being a Marine helped you in your work life? When I tell people I was a programmer in the Marine Corps for 4 years, they usually look at me in disbelief. No one assumes the Marine Corps needs programmers, but they do and I was one of them. My favorite resume line is that I’ve programmed websites in a gas mask during a war time environment while missiles were being fired at us. When you can learn to handle stress like that and keep plugging away at your job the typical day-to-day annoyances seem much less severe haha What do you attribute to your products/services massive success? I think a good majority of our success comes from being a part of the WordPress community. I love to speak at events, and my co-workers are also speaking at events, so being out there in front of people helps to show we not only can build amazing sites in WordPress, but we also love to give back and help others. We also create and release some fairly popular plugins for public consumption. We truly believe in the notion that the community is what makes WordPress so great, so anything we can do to give back we will certainly do! What are you currently working on? We have a lot of really fun projects going on at the moment. The most recent is the rebuild of CollabPress v1.0 that we just released. CollabPress is a task management plugin for WordPress. We rebuilt the plugin from the ground up to utilize custom post types and taxonomies. We have a few more plugins in the works, but those are hush hush at the moment 😉 Which product/service of yours did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? (It’s a readers favorite) I would say this goes back to when we first started open source website development. I never expected WordPress to be so popular, but a good majority of the contacts coming in already had, or knew they wanted to use, WordPress. That really helped steer our company in that direction and narrow our focus to WordPress exclusively. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? I think WordPress will keep evolving more and more into a full fledged CMS. We saw major steps in that direction with increased custom post type support, replacing the word “blog” with “site” in the admin, custom menus, etc. Thanks Brad for taking the time! See you at WordCamp Phoenix in the next couple weeks.
Here is another entry in our WP Heavy Hitters series that showcases the talent in the vibrant WordPress community. Lisa Sabin-Wilson has her hands in many WordPress cookie jars. She’s an author, designer, and WordCamp Organizer to name a few. She utilizes her past work experiences to deliver a service that is true to herself while continuing to benefit others. Lisa Sabin-Wilson Tag line: My kung foo is strong. (Rat, The Core) Knock Outs: WordPress For Dummies, BuddyPress For Dummies, WordPress All in One Desk Reference (coming Spring 2011 ), WordPress Web Design For Dummies (coming Spring 2011 ), E. Webscapes, WordCamp Chicago Power Move: RTFM Training Facilities: WordPress For Dummies, BuddyPress For Dummies, WordPress All in One, E.Webscapes How did you get started working with WordPress? By whining a great deal to a friend about the blogging platform I was using in 2003. It was a platform that forced me to rebuild every single post and page on my 3 year old blog anytime I wanted to make a design tweak to my theme, can you imagine? A friend of mine must have gotten tired of my whining and this is how our Yahoo! conversation went: Me: Seriously, do I really have to sit here and wait for 3 years of archives to rebuild every time I tweak my theme? Stop the madness Her: Same story, different day. Me: There oughta be a better way. Her: I stopped using it last week, maybe you should consider. Me: Really? What are you using now? Do tell! Her: a new platform called WordPress – heard of it? Me: Nope, but I’m willing to have a look. Her: You will love it – it’s easy and the template system is pretty flexible and no rebuilding Me: Thanks, but what will I bitch about then? Her: I’m sure you’ll find something. …and I did. Actually, I found plenty to bitch about over the years – but what happened with me is what happens with almost everyone confronted with the WordPress platform, I fell in love with the ease and simplicity of it all. I’ve been using WordPress since early 2003. Before WordPress, you were in health care and then began making HTML templates. How did those skills prepare you for what you do today? Doesn’t everyone need an RN who is skilled in the ways of WordPress design? It is a unique skill set, no doubt. Web design was always a hobby, dating back to the mid 90’s. It’s what I did in my off time to take my mind off my regular day job. It will come as no surprise when I say there are rare parallels that can be drawn between my former career as a Registered Nurse and my current career as a web designer – – but there are a few, and they include things like: Prioritization and Organization – otherwise known as Triage. As an RN, having the innate ability to take one quick look at a situation and immediately prioritize what needs to be done and organizing the tools and people to accomplish it is a valuable and essential skill. I spent 12 years of my nursing career honing that skill on a daily basis in critical situations that would probably make you cringe. That skill translated easily into running a design shop, with the bonus of not having to prioritize and organize during traumatic, life-or-death situations(mostly). That critical eye and skill or prioritization helps me look at a project and immediately start my mental checklist of what needs to be done, in order of importance, minus the band aids. Learning and adapting to new technologies– In health care, everything changes; nothing stays the same. I’ll be very honest and say that my years of college (nursing school) did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the realities of working with real patients in very real crisis. Graduation was an amazing day – but it all went down hill from there when I started my first job on a medical floor – – I was ill prepared and needed to be quick on my feet and learn at a very rapid pace if I was going to keep up. Everything from medical technology, equipment, medications and treatments changed regularly. As a nurse, we are expected to learn and understand every new medication the drug reps threw at us…become skilled on the new equipment that replaced the old equipment, that was just replaced 2 months ago. Adapting to change is not something that came easily to me at all (I’m a creature of habit, by nature), however; if I was going to survive in these environments, I needed to welcome change, embrace it and adapt to it or I would end up in the last bathroom stall on the 5th floor bawling my eyes out. Sense of humor – Nurses have the most wicked sense of humor out of any group of people I know. Maybe we weren’t naturally funny people to begin with, but years dealing with doctors, patients, family members, the bureaucracy of the health care system and working together in some pretty high stressed situations, a sense of humor naturally develops as a coping mechanism and a survival strategy to help you make it through to your next coffee break with your sanity still in tact. As a nurse, I developed my own crack sense of humor that helps me through stressful times – – nursing also helped me develop a greater sense of the world, and people, around me .. and, as such, I refuse to take myself too seriously and empathize with others a great deal. In my years in health care, I also developed a pretty quick read on other people, which serves me well in all areas of my life. Masochism – Nursing is a service oriented profession. Nurses are there to help, nurture, care for and take care of other people. Nurses usually see people at their worst, simply because of the circumstances that brought them to our doorstep to begin with – – the nature of that relationship isn’t always pleasant. As a nurse, you learn to take certain abuses and fully realize they aren’t personal – they are situational; with that realization comes the development of a great deal of patience and tolerance. I have an overabundance of patience and tolerance that has served me well….as well as done me a good deal of harm, in my career in design. Finding a middle ground there is my ongoing challenge. Most importantly, my nursing career taught me to put, and keep, things in perspective in order of importance in my life, and in my business. I can easily say that most things I know about business and customer service, I learned from nursing. Do you offer any recent downloadable WordPress themes or is most of your work custom? All of my work is currently 100% custom, made to order for my clients. I do not offer any downloadable products, at this time… What does the “E” stand for in E.Webscapes? Elegant. Back in 1999, the business was Elegant Webscapes and domain: elegantwebscapes.com. Sometime around 2004-2005, I shortened it to EWebscapes because it sounds less dorky. How did the relationship between you and Wiley Publishing begin? At the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas in 2006. I was asked to participate on a panel that year called “Making Money with your Blog Design Skills”. That panel had designers that represented three popular CMS platforms: WordPress, Movable Type and Expression Engine — I represented WordPress on that panel, naturally. Susannah Gardner, of Hop Studios, was on that panel with me and she is a veteran author of many books for Wiley Publishing (her most recent: Blogging For Dummies) – – she’s written several. She asked me if I would be interested in writing, or co-authoring, a WordPress For Dummies book? I said yes. That was in March 2006 and I never heard anything on the topic again until Wiley Publishing contacted me in November 2006 and said they needed the book written yesterday! I signed the contract then and the first edition of WordPress For Dummies was published in 2007. I have enjoyed a fabulous relationship with Wiley Publishing ever since, I am now on my 6th book with them and about to start my 7th. What do you attribute to your products/services massive success? First, thank you for the compliment…I appreciate that you call it a massive success 🙂 It’s difficult to put your own success into the right perspective – I am constantly told by family and peers that I don’t take my success seriously enough, or don’t realize its impact. Longevity is one thing — EWebscapes was probably one of a handful of its kind in the late 90’s in terms of providing customized themes for blogs…there certainly weren’t many of us. I have longevity on my side where, if I were just starting out today with the business with the same skills and abilities, I think it would be very difficult to stand out in a very, very competitive environment. I attribute my longevity in this business to patience, motivation, persistence and passion. I truly love what I do and I like to think it shines through all of my work, from design to public speaking to writing. Lastly, gratitude for being able to do something fun, call it work and make a comfortable living from it – I feel that every day and I think it makes a difference in the work I produce. Do you have a particular environment that allows for your best writing? You know, its weird – – when I am designing, I need music – – lots of music and lots of different kids of music. It’s not unusual for me to flip back and forth between Metallica and Britney Spears, or Pink Floyd and Pink during the course of several hours when I am designing. When I am writing, however – I need dead silence. It drives my family nuts. While planning WordCamp Chicago, were there any pleasant or unpleasant surprises you encountered? Yes, and yes. I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout at WordCamp Chicago. The first year I organized it, WordCamp Chicago saw 200 attendees – – and we could have done a lot more if the venue that year could have accommodated it. This year, I organized the event for 500 attendees, which was pretty exciting! I really loved seeing a big group of people sharing ideas, networking and discussing something they are all so passionate about. I enjoy experiencing the different levels of users you see at WordCamps – everyone from a complete beginner all the way to the advanced core developer, together in one space – it’s pretty cool. In 2009, we had one attendee who didn’t even know what WordPress was – – her and a few attendees sat around a table and she started her first WordPress blog. In 2010, that same lady came back to WordCamp Chicago and was teaching others how to use the platform – – how awesome is that? In terms of unpleasant surprises? Yea, there were a few – – nothing significant enough to mention, though. Probably the most unpleasant comes from the fact that I cannot be involved with WordCamp Chicago in 2011 because my family and I are moving to Atlanta, GA and it’s just not feasible for me to organize an event in Chicago, from Atlanta. I am surprised at how sad it makes me to have to give it up. My hope is that someone will pick it up where I left off and I can continue to enjoy the event as an attendee! What are you currently working on? Breathing. Getting enough sleep. Coffee. Oh, you mean work? Ahh – – lots! Ask me on any given day and I’m always working on a client site launch – I’ve had several of those happen over the past few months. I am also just about to finish and publish two new books for Wiley Publishing: WordPress All In One For Dummies and WordPress Web Design For Dummies. I’ve spent the past 2-3 months working on getting those books ready for print and am really excited to see them available for pre-order on Amazon.com now – – that means they’ll be available to the public soon! Shortly after 2011 comes around I will be diving into the 4th edition of WordPress For Dummies. I do have a couple of things up my sleeve for 2011 that will extend my business and offerings to my community – I’m not ready to discuss those yet, so you’ll have to check back with me in February or March, ok? 🙂 Which product/service of yours did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? My husband and I dipped our toes into the web hosting business back in 2003 and never really thought it would become a sustainable business for us. It didn’t even really start out as a business plan at all. Chris, my husband, is a Linux guy and likes to have control over his own environment, so we purchased a server back then and he started configuring and tinkering with it the way he wanted it and we were hosting our own business web sites on it. That server grew as we added accounts for friends and family… then Chris got the bright idea of offsetting some of the server cost by selling a few accounts on it to help pay the monthly cost of the server. The hosting business grew, organically, from there as I started using it as a tool for my design clients who needed a hosting solution. It was easy to set them up on our servers where we had full admin control over their site and could get things done faster and more efficiently. Today, we host several hundred clients – 98% of whom are running WordPress as their preferred platform. I could give up my design business completely, and our hosting business would continue to pay the bills – – that was not at all what we expected when we purchased our first server almost 8 years ago. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? I like seeing how WordPress is evolving more into the social web through the innovation of the BuddyPress plugin and the improvements and features we’re seeing come from that development process — I think WordPress will continue making that an easier experience and we’ll start to see a lot more micro-communities pop up using a WordPress/BuddyPress combination. Other than that, whatever WordPress comes up with – I’m along for the ride for as long as I’m upright and breathing. Lisa, definitely keep us posted regarding your upcoming WordPress adventures. Thanks for all that you do for the community.
This is another entry in our WP Heavy Hitters series that showcases the talent in the vibrant WordPress community. Joost De Valk hails from that cool place formerly known has Holland. He has been very active in the WP community for several years and has contributed many of the popular plugins you know and love. His soft spot is SEO which is apparent by the numerous links populating this interview. Joost De Valk Tag line: I tweak websites, from search engine rankings, to speed to user experience. Knock Outs: Yoast.com, WordPress Podcast, Quix, Google Analytics for WordPress, various other plugins. Power Move: Making WordPress SEO and speed optimization so easy that people switch platforms just because of it. Training Facilities: Yoast.com, Quix, Google Analytics for WordPress, Plugins How did you get started working with WordPress? My first ever WordPress site was my own blog, then still on joostdevalk.nl. On that blog I was experimenting with CSS3 a lot, this was in 2006 when CSS3 was still very very new. The CSS3 previews I made soon got so many visitors that I decided to make another site, CSS3.info (which I’ve since sold), which was also in WordPress. On this site I started playing with SEO techniques and found WordPress to be easily optimizable when I did some small modifications, and so I started building plugins. I started blogging about those on joostdevalk.nl, which later on became yoast.com, and well, some history was made since 🙂 What do you attribute to your products/services massive success? In no particular order: proper usability, proper marketing and building stuff people actually need. Do you think living outside of the USA has helped, hurt, or made zero difference in your success? It would probably have been easier if I lived there, I’d have attended & spoken at more conferences etc. On the other hand: it helps my productivity that I don’t do these things as much 🙂 I take it that Yoast is the American pronunciation of Joost? Yoast is indeed how to pronounce my name for Americans 😉 Yoast and WordPress appear to have a special partnership. Could you explain it to our readers and share how that partnership started? Well there’s not much special about it in that there’s some sort of written down deal on anything. I just work with WordPress all day long and focus on that, and that has helped me a lot. As a thank you to the community I do a lot of free releases and speak at WordCamps etc. I always try to give more than I get, because you always end up both giving and getting more that way…. Was there a WordCamp that was more memorable and why? They all were in their own ways. The cool thing about WordCamps in different European countries is that you get to see some of the culture sip through into their own WordCamp. What are you currently working on? My super secret project of the moment (not that secret, to be honest, I talk too much for that) is a roll-up of all the SEO plugins I’ve made into one WordPress SEO plugin, with a lot of added features to it. I’m calling it, a bit tongue in cheek, a real All in one SEO solution, since it’ll do everything I think you’ll need to optimize a WordPress site for search engines. Next to that, some client projects are taking up my time, as well as a new version of my Google Analytics plugin which should include a lot of new stuff. Do you think calling your plugin a real All in one SEO solution will cause confusion in the market place and possibly be seen as disrespectful since there’s an existing plugin with that name? I won’t name it that when it comes out, it’ll just be called “WordPress SEO”. –In beta now Will your future SEO solution plugin be free or a premium product? The core will be free, there will be paid addon modules for it later on though, sort of like the WP E-Commerce model. What is some of the new stuff that will be included in your new version of your Google Analytics plugin? Mobile tracking and an analytics dashboard are the most important features. Many people claim to do SEO but many really don’t know how to get top rankings. How do you assure people that you know what you’re doing and how do you feel about all the snake oil salesmen? I don’t have to assure them. The lucky thing of having my reputation is that people come to me for advice and I hardly have to sell them on anything. I have worked, and still work, with both huge businesses (eBay, Salesforce, f.i.) and small business alike (local contractors, my mum’s relationship therapy business) and given them real results. Those clients will always refer other people to me. The key thing is to remain honest. I got quite a bit of flack from some people in the community (privately, by emails and Twitter DM’s etc.) when I published my WordPress hosting article. You see, I was open about being paid for the referrals coming from that. I’m still open about the fact that I can choose with whom to make money, and that I then prefer to make money with those who actually service my readers well. In fact, if I could make loads of money by referring people to bad products, I just wouldn’t do it. My reputation is worth more to me than any kind of money. What would be your solution to the problem of snake oil salesmen? There is no real solution. People need first page, or actually top 5, rankings and they’ll always be tempted to believe someone can get them for them if he has a slick story. To prevent yourself from walking into holes like that, just make sure you check credentials, google them, see if they’ve ever done anything that other people wrote about. Another option would be to go to a SES or SMX conference or other search conference in your neighborhood, and see some of these people speak. Just look around and you’ll find who the good guys are. Didn’t google just launch something that many some SEOs believe will kill their industry? How do you feel about it and what are your plans? No it won’t, if you’re referring to Google Instant. It might change a bit which words people search for, but it’ll never change SEO entirely. You see, in essence, SEO is the art and the science of how people search for what keywords, and how a search engine finds and matches pages to fit those keywords. That, in itself, is entirely independent of what the current technology is. If Google would die tomorrow and another search engine would rise, you’d still need SEO, just for another search engine. Which product/service of yours did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? Hmm don’t know if that has ever happened. I always test the grounds so much that I’m quite sure by the time I release something that it’ll work. I did have a sort of “wow” experience when I recently introduced my site analysis service, I expected to do a couple of those per month, and ended up doing about 10 of them per week, which was a bit more than I had bargained for. So the price on that (now $500) will probably go up soon as I do those myself and that, well, doesn’t scale at all… Where do you see WordPress going in the future? More towards a complete CMS than “just” a blogging engine. It’s going that way fast, but it still needs polish on some of these fronts. Which CMS fronts do you think WordPress should tackle first? Easier URL structure management for custom posts and taxonomies and a taxonomy meta data table are highest on my wishlist. Joost, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and some details on future endeavors. Keep us posted.
This is another entry in our WP Heavy Hitters series that showcases the talent in the vibrant WordPress community. Who said programming is just for guys? Andrea is an expert in WordPress and specifically the multi user variety with skills that put most guys to shame. Andrea Rennick Tag line: Roflcopters ahoy! Knock Outs: WordPress Must Use Tutorials, HomeSchoolJournal.net, WP eBooks plugins, Premium BP Themes Power Move: Forum Air Flare with MU Madness Training Facilities: wpmututorials.com, PremiumBPThemes, WPeBooks How did you get started working with WordPress? I’ve been a blogger for years, back when it was online journaling, and I came to WordPress with the licensing change on Movabletype 2.6, so WordPress was around version 1.5 then. I just got really interested in the template system, as it has just switched from being stylesheets only. I started figuring it out, because it was really interesting, and seeing what other moms were doing with their blogs just inspired me to try it for myself. I found I really liked figuring out what made it work, and how to change certain things, and other moms in the online world would eventually ask for my help. Then I figured out I could get paid. I was mostly a stay at home mom then, homeschooling our four children, and in our online circles knew a lot of people who wanted to start a blog. That’s how I found out about WordPress MU, so I set up homeschooljournal.net. It was in alpha stage then, and the only resource was the forums, so I set up a blog to write about all the things I was figuring out. That was the start of wpmututorials.com Could you tell us more about your tutorials and eBooks? The impetus for it was the realization that we had too many clients, and many of the people we were turning down wanted similar sites to ones we had developed before, or the same sort of plugin. Especially those kinds of plugins that needed extra documentation and support to get running. They are also more fun to do – Ron gets to code up something awesome, and I get to write about it. We also found in doing client work, a number of our developer friends were willing to pay for help for these kinds of plugins, so putting them out there in the market seemed natural. This way more end-users get helped. What are some of the plugins you offer? What do these plugins do? Professional Domain Mapping – this plugin is a more streamlined version than the WPMU Domain Mapping that is available. It gives one menu for the Super Admin to map a top-level domain to any blog in the network, and also hides the originating domain. It’s been incredibly useful for devs who manage one network with a site for each client. Or, if you want to manage multiple domains from one install, and have very few users. Networks Plus – is similar to domain mapping in that you can use different top-level domains with any other site. the added difference is this allows you to create another network in the install. Each new domain you add will have the ability to have child blogs. The WP Replicator plugin is for admins running a network who wish to set up a template blog with all the default they wish – widgets, plugin settings, theme settings, and copy that at any time, or have it be applied to any new blog created in the network, with one click. This is our best seller. What are you currently working on? I’m working on some more ebooks for setting up specific kinds of sites, geared towards developers or people who just want to use WordPress to make that kind of site for themselves. Like we did a business directory kind of site for a client, had it in our portfolio and then had a lot of requests about it. Putting that in ebook format with the plugins needed seems like a win-win. I’m also co-authoring a book with some really cool people: Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Michael Torbert and Kevin Palmer. It’s called the WordPress All-In-One Desk reference and should be out in spring of next year. I’ll be doing the section on multisite, of course. link: http://lisasabin-wilson.com/wordpress-all-in-one-desk-reference/ We’ve also got some exciting changes coming up for PremiumBPThemes.com, but I’m not quite ready to spill on that yet. Would you mind listing some of the ebooks you offer? In addition to the ones that come with the plugins mentioned above, I’ve just released a free ebook located at http://wpebooks.com/2010/09/how-to-enable-multisite-in-wordpress/ It goes over step by step how to enable the network (multisite) in WordPress, complete with screenshots and any tricky situations you might encounter during setup. Also, the next edition of the Domain Mapping ebook will have sections specific to some of the more popular hosts. 🙂 What do you attribute to your products/services success? I really could not have done all this without Ron. We’d met in college when we both took a computer programming course. I figured out it wasn’t for me, we got married and he started his career. So while I was home poking and prodding WordPress, I was able to ask him some of the more difficult coding questions. Eventually, I was asking more difficult questions and he had to sit down and start working with it himself. He’d worked as a freelancer before, and when what I was doing started to really take off, we decided we’d both jump in. I also think that because Ron & I are a two-person shop, we can quickly adjust any business ideas we have and make small changes that can really help us in the long run. Another thing is all the people that have helped us along the way – the WordPress community really does give a hand up. What’s it like working with your husband? 😀 Most days, it’s really awesome. I can often say half a sentence and he knows exactly what I’m referring to. And being a freelancer working from home is usually solitary, so it’s nice to have someone right there who understands the work you do. Since he’d worked from home before, we as a family were used to having him around too, and we liked that. On the other hand, it took some adjustments in working together. It’s different relating to your spouse in a work environment, and we’d taken more traditional roles in our marriage. In our work life, there was a space where we each had to adjust the way we thought of the other, and how we could talk about work-related issues without it becoming something we had to avoid at the dinner table. I mean, it’s one thing if your spouse doesn’t fold the laundry the same way you do. Most people can move on. When you work with your spouse, and they troubleshoot css issues using a different approach than you… sometimes you just have to turn your chair around and not watch them. It was also a bit of an ego check to have introduced Ron to WordPress, then watch him exceed me greatly in his knowledge of the code itself. But, we’ve also grown in our workflow, so we stick with what we both work best at, which happily compliments each other. How do you see Multi-Site evolving? More streamlined. 🙂 I can see things that are global becoming more efficient with a few new functions for people to hook into, to further plugin development specifically geared towards global content; both the management and display of. I can see users becoming easier to manage across the network as well. I can’t see it becoming easier to set up though. To me, it’s still an intermediate level (not for beginners) server-based feature and will probably remain so for a long time. Which product/service of yours did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? One thing that fizzled was a plugin we had sold to remove the /blog/ permalink in subfolder setups. A couple other plugins to do the exact same thing were all released around the same time. But this goes back to what I was saying earlier about being able to make adjustments quickly. We just pulled it down and moved on to the next thing on our list. Something that took off in a huge way was the free ebook I wrote on how to set up WordPress MU 2.7. I honestly never expected it to be such a big hit, it was just something I wrote up to make it easier for the people I was helping in the forums who needed extensive guidance. Last time I checked, it had been downloaded over 18 *thousand* times. I’m still amazed. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? Up up and waaaaay up. 🙂 Five years ago, it was a baby. Five years from now, we won’t be asking people what powers their blog, it’ll be WordPress. Andrea shows her admiration for her family and WordPress with her ending remark. I have the most adorable granddaughter in the entire world. 😀 Related to that, the second generation of WordPress developers are coming. One of our children is studying to be a graphic designer with plans to go into WordPress freelancing. Sarah’s definitely someone to watch – we took her to WordCamp Montreal with us and we had a blast. Thanks Andrea for the interview. Keep us posted on your future adventures.
This is one of the first of many posts in which we will be profiling the heavy hitters of the WordPress community. Who are the people behind your favorite plugins and themes? What makes them tick? Why are they awesome? And what sort of things are they working on for the future? Inquiring minds want to know. John James Jacoby Tag line: Go Voltron Force! Knock Outs: Lead Developer for BuddyPress and bbPress Plugin Power Move: wikki wikki wikki Training Facilities: johnjamesjacoby.com, BuddyPress.org I‘ve heard people call you John, John James, J-Trip, and Trip -J. Do you have any other aliases and which title do you prefer? Aliases: jjj / j-trip / trip-j / j-cube / john Preferred: John / j-trip / jjj On your website JJJ.blog, it states that you have experience with design, development, and consulting. A great trifecta. Do you gravitate to a certain area? Which area did you start in and what made you learn the others? Started off as a designer because I had no idea what development was. Was introduced to Visual Basic 3.0 by a friend in high school and knew in my heart I was meant to be a developer. In the beginning I had no idea that developers and designers were two separate jobs and skills (let alone UX, info architects, etc…), and always just did everything myself because I didn’t know anyone that could do any one thing better than I thought I could. Fast forward a decade or so to today, and I’m surrounded by great people that do everything amazingly. Who is one of the great people that you look up to? Currently I look up to a few people for a few different reasons. I look up to Mark Jaquith because of his talent, knowledge, and ability to break things down into easy to understand terms. I look up to Andy Peatling for what he’s done with BuddyPress and for giving me a lot of good feedback and advice the past few years. I look up to and really appreciate Jane Wells for taking on so much responsibility and being such a positive influence in so many peoples lives. I look up to Matt Mullenweg because he’s a fantastic public speaker, which is something I need to practice at again. Most importantly I will always look up to my parents for being amazingly patient and understanding people. My dad is the dad who spent a few months worth of savings on the first Pentium 100Mhz computer that came out back in 1994 so I could learn how to make programs in Windows, and my mom is the mom who called me in sick to school to finish programs I was working on. My parents have always trusted and had faith in me to do the right things, and that’s something I will always look up to them for; they’re just amazingly cool people. What skills do you consider to be your strength? I personally enjoy refactoring code a lot. I like going through code and refining it to make it faster, or more secure, or easier to use. I also really like building API’s that can be reused or extended by other applications or other developers. I’m a pretty strong architect in terms of how to store data for efficient retrieval, and I like to think I have a really good ability to understand how all of the pieces of a project fit together. I’m also pretty good at making grilled cheese sandwiches. How did you get started working with WordPress? I actually found WordPress around the 2.4/2.5 days, and remember hating the way it looked. I was contributing to CHBB and osCommerce back from 2004 to 2006, and was always looking for something that was easier to style and make modifications to without ‘hacking the core.’ I took a few years off web development as my full-time job for a while, and when I came back out of desperation I scoured the web for any other Open Source platform that allowed for elaborate data categorization, and found WordPress and bbPress simultaneously, loved the way taxonomies worked, and never looked back. What is your favorite BuddyPress feature? When I first started contributing to BuddyPress, my favorite feature was XProfile, and the fact you could finally have a true ‘author’ page on your WordPress site. Now, I think my favorite feature is something that will be new for 1.3; a BP_Component class that will help plugin developers rapidly roll their own components. BuddyPress seems to require more cpu resources above and beyond WordPress, is there any work being done to make it more efficient? Long term the most effective way BuddyPress can limit the resources it uses is by converting to using Custom Post Types and trimming down the volume of PHP code loaded at runtime. Right now the components are very similar, and there is a lot of duplicated code that will be put into a core component class to help alleviate some of that in 1.3. There are also a few circumstances where BuddyPress could be a little smarter about how it decides to load what libraries, and I think 1.4 will be when we sit down and concentrate on that. An example is when you’re viewing something like your Friends, there’s no reason to load up the entire Groups component code and process all of the background actions and hooks for code that will never execute. Just little things we could do would make a big difference I think over time. What are you currently working on? Working on getting the next bug fix of BuddyPress released, the bbPress plugin, the WP Swag Store makeover, the WordCamp.org makeover, WP e-Commerce, WP Multi Network, and a few other plugins that I try to maintain. Do you still work on client projects? Right now I’m actually turning away work at the rate of almost a project a day because I don’t have the bandwidth. BuddyPress developers that need work and have available time, ping me! On your twitter bio, I noticed that you mentioned a love of puppies. Do you ever feel like a rare breed in the sea of cat lovers that occupy the WordPress core? Westi loves my pups, but yeah it’s hard sometimes when you’re up against Jane’s cute kittehs and Ryan’s goats and ferrets. I think eventually my dogs will have their days. No question- WE agree, dogs rule. =) Which part of BuddyPress did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? The Groups component has been used in some pretty awesome ways, even to the point where it’s been totally recoded and turned into a totally new component. I think I expected for the Activity stream to be a little more exciting than it is. Our current implementation of bbPress leaves something to be desired, but it was an experiment and we learned from it and we’ll be moving on to an improved integration method soon enough. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? Why is everything so heavy in the future? Is there some kind of problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull? I imagine as it starts to turn into a more robust content management solution, things like better custom Post Type support, better Multisite support, less complex media management, more obvious user role/capability management, and smarter post relationships will need to happen. I also think theme and plugin developers are pushing the envelope on how far they can take things without modifying WP core, and that will only continue to motivate and help show off how infinitely extendable WordPress’s reach can be. Do you have plans to work on any of these future enhancements? Which ones? I hope to help out with some of the post relationship stuff, since it will directly benefit BuddyPress and bbPress to have that in WordPress core. I also have always been interested in Multisite and Multi-network installations, so I’ll probably throw some patches at the 3.1 network UI too. I haven’t signed up for any official responsibilities though; I think my personal life may miss me if I try to take on anything else! A word from John- Something I preach at WordCamps to freelancers or contractors that ask about getting involved or helping out, I always tell them that contributing back to a core project is the best thing you can do for your career. Anything you can do to share your experience, knowledge, and help other people out (even your competition) will always pay off positively in the long run. I’ve made great friends, great business connections, and have been very fortunate and blessed to be able to have a job that I love to do I feel as a direct result of volunteering my time in the community. We can all learn from each other and together we’re all making some really kick-ass stuff! John wanted to give some props out- (We blushed. Thanks John) Pagely, Automattic, 9Seeds, WebDevStudios, Voce Communications, Crowd Favorite, Covered Web Services, E Webscapes, C. Murray, StudioPress, Tammy Hart, WP Coders… all the core contributors to bbPress, BuddyPress, and WordPress… all the WordCampers.
This is the first of many posts in which we will be profiling the heavy hitters of the WordPress community. Who are the people behind some of your favorite plugins and themes? What makes them tick? Why are they awesome? And what sort of things are they working on for the future. Inquiring minds want to know. Alex King Tag line: No shortage of ideas. Knock Outs: Crowd Favorite, WordPress HelpCenter, Carrington Build, Twitter Tools, Share This, WordPress Mobile Edition, Carrington Core and the Carrington theme family. Power Move: The obviou-virtuoso – elegantly executing on opportunities I can no longer ignore. Training Facilities: alexking.org, crowdfavorite.com, WPHelpCenter.com How did you get started building your empire? Reluctantly. 🙂 When I moved from the Bay Area to Denver at the end of 2003, I decided to make a go of working on my own. I built some web applications and did some consulting work. I also continued to build things for WordPress (plugins, some core contributions here and there) and was active in the community (style and theme competitions). As the WordPress community grew, more and more interesting opportunities presented themselves. I resisted this for a little while, but in 2007 I finally decided to hire someone so I could engage in more of these projects, and since then we have grown a full time team of 14 with an office in downtown Denver. I really enjoy being able to work on so many interesting projects with my team, and being able to build much more than I could on my own. While I do sometimes miss some of the freedom of being an independent developer and being knee deep in code every day, on balance I’m very pleased with how things have gone. What are you currently working on? Besides our client engagements, many of which are quite interesting, but unfortunately not areas I’m able to discuss at this time, we’ve got a couple of things going: 1. Updates to Carrington Build to add some new features that I think will be really popular. We’ll probably create another theme as an example of how to use them – that seems to be the best way to make features accessible to end-users and developers alike. The initial response to Build has been great, and I’m looking forward to seeing the Build-enabled themes from our partners hit the market as well. I expect we’ll see a few of those pretty soon here. 2. Updates to all of our plugins. We hope to have them all up to the latest best practices in the next few months. It’s a pretty sizable effort, we’ve got about 30 plugins that we’ve released over the years. 3. We’ve created a number of custom web applications that we use to run things at Crowd Favorite and WordPress HelpCenter. These are built on an application framework I’ve been working on for the past 3 years. I’m optimistic that we’ll be shipping our first apps by the end of the year. Hopefully, other teams with similar needs to ours will find them as useful as we do. Any chance you could tell us more about the custom web apps you use? We’ve basically created a set of apps that we use to effectively run our businesses. The first one that I expect to bring to market is an app that helps us keep our client’s websites up to date. It allows us to track what packages we have installed on a website, then hooks into APIs for product updates and automatically track available upgrades and status for each site. It’s definitely aimed at a niche market, but I think it’s a really useful tool. I really enjoy developing on the custom application platform we’ve built. Think MVC pattern with the flexibility and customization capabilities (plugin and themes, hooks and filters) of WordPress. We’ve used it to efficiently create a number of custom web applications for our clients with great success. What do you attribute to your products/services massive success? There are probably a couple of reasons, but I’d say the main one is that we are our own customer. I’ve typically created plugins/themes/products that I need. I have an intimate knowledge of the user stories for the products and tailor the user experience to those needs. Over time, they typically become more generalized to suit a wider audience, but they start with deep functionality from the beginning, instead of just surface functionality or lip service features. I also think that a dedication to quality has served us well. We take the time to build things right, even though very few people outside our team probably realize or appreciate some of these things. We have long term relationships with many of our clients, and the initial investment in quality really pays off over time. It makes the sites easier to maintain, and means that future features are much more easily integrated into the overall site architecture. We refer clients to WordPress HelpCenter when they require further development of their Pagely sites. What can our client’s expect when they contact you? They can expect solutions to their WordPress needs! That’s perhaps an over-simplification of what you were looking for, but it’s exactly the service we provide. Like our products, I created the WordPress HelpCenter explicitly to fill a need that I was experiencing first-hand, a void that I saw in the WordPress community. At Crowd Favorite we typically take on larger project engagements. Because of this, our teams are often booked out at least a few months and we have to pass on projects that have quick timelines or a need to start right away. This also means we typically pass on smaller projects because most people quite reasonably aren’t interested in waiting 2 months for a 3 day project. Over the years we have maintained relationships with a number of independent developers that are better suited for these quicker-turn projects. However, over time these developers found that they could better manage their workload and client base by catering to fewer, larger projects rather than being available for the smaller engagements we were sending their way. In effect, if a developer was doing a good job, they became less and less available for the projects we were referring to them. This is the crux of the problem. There weren’t good, experienced developers available for smaller WordPress projects. If someone needed something quickly, they were stuck choosing from the developers that didn’t already have work. You may have heard the term “beware of the developer that can start immediately”, this was exactly that problem. To solve it, I created WordPress HelpCenter. Though we have a great team of experienced WordPress developers, we focus exclusively on smaller engagements – most under 1 week in size and some are just a few hours. This enables WPHC to be able to be more responsive when people contact us with urgent needs for quick-turn projects, troubleshooting, answers to questions, support, etc. The business has grown consistently, and we now have a full time staff of 3 (we are currently interviewing to hire another full time developer) with additional support from our Crowd Favorite development team when needed. We have a nice group of clients that we provide ongoing site maintenance services for (upgrades, optimizations, feature development, etc.) and a good mix of new customers that contact us via phone and email every day. Will the WordPress HelpCenter be able to maintain the low hourly rate while remaining profitable? We are constantly evaluating the services we provide and making adjustments where needed. Recently we had experiences with the Twitter OAuth fiasco that taught us more about what the community in general is willing to pay for (hint: if they think it’s a bug in the plugin, they don’t want to pay for help – even when it’s *not* a bug in the plugin and actually due to a server config or user error). We want to be able to provide services to as many people as possible. I expect we will always experiment with new offerings and cut old ones based on the reaction from our customers. The bottom line is that we have to keep the business financially viable in order to be able to help the WordPress community (and I owe it our team and their families). Which product/service of yours did you expect to make a big hit but either fizzled or was used in a completely different way than you anticipated? I wouldn’t call the Carrington Core platform a fizzle, but it definitely hasn’t taken off the way I thought it would. I think there are a few reasons, for one we didn’t package it well enough or have enough information initially about the benefits and how exactly it makes things easier. It was too different, and it was too much of a mental leap for most folks. They looked at it, saw it was different, didn’t understand how it worked, and didn’t dig much deeper. I’ve had numerous discussions with developers that had this initial experience. Typically after I talk with them for 2 minutes about what it does, their eyes light up and they get really excited about it. We had a complete blind spot for this. To us (having built and used the system for months – now years), the benefits are so self evident they needed no explanation. It’s just a better/easier way to organize your theme files and reduce the amount of code you have to write. A practical example is that it enables our designers to build pretty sophisticated theme features without writing any PHP code – we used to have to bring in developers to write custom code, and now we don’t have to for various theme features. Unfortunately these benefits were lost on the majority of the community. Sure we have a number of vocal advocates, mostly from folks with experience with other real development frameworks or creating advanced WordPress-powered CMS sites and running into the pain points Carrington Core solves. About a year after the initial release I created some more example-driven documentation and a couple diagrams; that definitely seemed to help understanding and adoption. Before we released Carrington Core, we were so wrapped up in our own experience that the initial ambivalent reaction caught us entirely by surprise. It was a good lesson. It’s not enough to create a great system. If you want people to get excited about it, you need to make it accessible and easy to understand with minimal effort on their part. When we released Carrington Build, we didn’t even try to pitch the core system and framework or all the great technical features it includes. Instead, we made a few videos and created an example theme so that people could try it out and experience how it works first, then the more tech savvy can be thrilled to discover how elegant it is on the back-end. Where do you see WordPress going in the future? I’m not sure if I can answer for WordPress as a community, but I know where we plan to go with it. We are continually creating tools to make it a more refined platform. As this happens, it will result in more and more interesting things being built on it, from traditional blogs and CMS sites to fledgling web applications and services. I don’t know that things will change as much as everything will just work better and we’ll be able to do more, easier. Thank you, Alex for taking the time!
B A N A N A S Pretty much sums up the last year – It’s been bananas. Never ending Pandemic, New Brands, Growth, Working towards compliance, New Product Launches, and more. This September 2021 is a very special month for us. Pagely, and by extension the entire multi-billion dollar Managed WordPress Hosting channel, is 12yrs old! Quick Flashback: In Early 2009 I opened up my IDE and started looking at some code we wrote in 2006 for a website builder based on WordPress. I added a few features to it, picked a new leet domain name, and in September 2009 – Launched Page.ly – The world’s first Managed WordPress hosting company. All the WordPress hosting buzzwords you know and love: Automatic Backups Automatic Updates Blazingly Fast Secure like Fort Knox 1 Click Staging Caching All. Of. It. Started. Here. Yes of course it is true we did not actually create everything under the sun, however the early work we did in the space is the parent to every Managed WordPress product offering available, regardless of the company selling it. Except billing for Pageviews, eff that noise – we don’t want any part of that. Team Retreat in 2015 Always Forward As Pagely begins it’s 13th year we have a strong wind at our back once again. I’m sure in some companies, especially investor fueled ones, growth is always fast and up while profitability is tied up in ropes and cinder blocks, then thrown off the end of the pier. In our company we’ve had our periods of growth insanity and just normal one foot in front of the other measured progress to increased profitability and high NPS scores. 2018 through most of 2020 was a bit of an odd timeframe for us when looking back – we invested heavily into the development of NorthStack and gained deep technical learnings. These lessons were then applied to Pagely as the decision was made to pause the NorthStack product while we felt out how the world was going to react to a fast spreading novel Coronavirus. Team Retreat Early 2020 As we came up to a major revenue milestone in 2020 we turned our focus inward to reevaluate our processes and to create new ones, address team makeup, and revisited our mission and values. We took the time to prepare for what was coming and to lay the foundational groundwork for our future goals. Less manic startup energy – more “we’re a real business now” mentality. We hired into newly created roles in team management, finance, enterprise sales, and compliance. Sally and I handed off more and more of the day-to-day responsibilities to our skilled team so we could take stock of where we are, and where we needed to go. Then we all worked together to formulate the plan to get us there. Allison’s (SupportOps Manager) dogs: Winne and Lola (“Karen”). The last year has been all about executing on that plan. We added 30% to our headcount – while improving and expanding our benefit offerings. We’ve engaged the services of an auditing firm and will shortly achieve SOC 2 – Type 2 compliance certification. Our brand glow up – which is the culmination of months of work by our Dir of Marketing Dave Amirault, and the creative team at Struck – will be launching momentarily. We’ve delivered on many of the requested features to our Enterprise clientele such as Single Sign On (SSO) to our services, and expanded support models and enhanced SLA’s. Back of the napkin math tells me our employees significantly increased their usage of PTO – after much encouragement and prodding from myself and their team leads. We launched Mercury just a few weeks back, which is a major win for our bottom line and our customers’ site performance. 20-30% faster network speeds on every request at cheaper data rates. Truly a win-win. These and many more items that are part of our strategic plan have resulted in a steadily growing sales pipeline and a pronounced upward shift in our momentum heading into 2022. Did I mention we are hiring? Get your tech jobs here. Times have changed. The important stuff has not. Jeff Matson’s doggo – Henry 2021 was also an emotional roller-coaster as we all bared witness to the, at times, abject selfish nature of people — and — the grit, empathy, and kindness of others. Sally and I have personally seen all of this up close and personal this year, a story we may share at another time. Each day though we took heart that by and large, the world is good and things tend to work out in the end. Keep the good people in your life close, and hug your kids every day. It costs you nothing to be kind. We lean on our core values as we make decisions and plan for the future. We also relied on them heavily in the past as we navigated the ups and downs of the pandemic. Sally has always said that if we do the right thing, success will follow. Doing the right thing by the people in our lives, our companies, and our communities is typically a selfless act with no expectation of return. At times though, the universe does surprise you with a healthy payback of goodwill, tenfold. There are lot’s of new faces at Pagely, as we said goodbye to others. It seems everyone has collectively reevaluated how they wish to invest their work time. Many leaned into the stability of good careers, others felt it was time to explore new options. At each coming and going I’m thankful to see new faces embrace our vision and values and old friends take a little part of the Pagely magic with them as they move forward to a new adventure. We are just as committed today as we were yesterday, and every day prior to becoming the best version of Pagely we can be. Branding work in 2021 Looking forward is as exciting today as it has been at each one of our 11 prior birthdays. I want to personally thank the team here at Pagely, and all of our customers and the fans we have in the WordPress community for being part of our journey thus far. Happy Birthday to Us. This coming year is going be the most interesting chapter in our story yet. I guarantee it.
