Online shopping has made it super-convenient for online shoppers to hunt around for the best prices. With this in mind, customers are perhaps more sensitive to prices than at any other point in history. After all, why would you pay $500 for a product when the exact same model is available for $100 less? You don’t even have to traipse across town, either; you’re just a few mouse clicks away from the cheaper price. It’s a no-brainer, right? This has turned online customers into a group of serial bargain hunters. Today I want to help ensure that your eCommerce store appeals to online customers’ hunger for a bargain. Let me show you exactly how to run a pricing promotion using coupon codes with WooCommerce. Creating a Coupon Code with WooCommerce If you’re brand new to WooCommerce, you’ll need to install the WooCommerce plugin first, then add a few products to your store before creating a coupon code. That’s a tutorial for another day, though, as I want to focus this tutorial specifically on how to set up a coupon code with WooCommerce. With this in mind, I’m going to go ahead and assume you’ve already got a WooCommerce-powered shop up and running. To create a coupon, simply click WooCommerce > Coupons from within the WordPress dashboard. Go ahead and create your first coupon by selecting Add Coupon. Start by creating the code for your coupon at the top — this is the code customers will apply at the checkout to get their discount. It’s also worth adding a brief description below to help you remember what the coupon is for. The coupon page has three tabs on the left-hand side: General, Usage Restriction, and Usage Limits. General Coupon Tab Let’s start with the first tab, General. The General tab lets you specify what type of discount you’re offering. The out-the-box version of WooCommerce supports four discount types: Cart Discount — a fixed discount on your whole cart Cart % Discount — a percentage discount on your whole cart Product Discount — a fixed discount on a specific product/s Product % Discount — a percentage discount on a specific product/s For this tutorial, I’m going to be offering a fixed discount on a specific product — a PlayStation 4 — so I’ve selected the Product Discount option. Below, you must specify the Coupon amount. If you’ve picked one of the % options, the number used here will determine the % discount. If you picked a fixed discount, it will determine the amount off in dollar-terms — or your store’s default currency. I’ve gone ahead and added ‘25′ in this field, which means I’m offering a $25 discount on the regular price. Further down, you can offer free shipping with a valid code, simply by checking the Allow free shipping checkbox. At the bottom, you can set an expiry date for your coupon, which is useful when running timely promotions — Black Friday, anyone? The expiry date is selected from a drop-down calendar. Usage Restrictions Tab OK, with the General settings configured, let’s move onto the Usage Restrictions tab. This is the tab where you’ll configure your coupon’s specific requirements — in other words, how it’s activated. For example, you can set which minimum/maximum subtotals the coupon is valid between — great for ‘10% off orders over $100’ promotions. You can also check the checkboxes to restrict one coupon code per order and prevent the coupon being applied to sale items — both recommended. You can configure the code to apply to/exclude specific products and categories, too. This first option is relevant for the coupon I’m configuring, which is a $25 discount on a PlayStation 4. Obviously, I want a PlayStation 4 in my customer’s cart, otherwise, the coupon should be invalid. Fortunately, WooCommerce helps you find your products easily: You can either input the first three letters of your product name or the product ID. Setting Usage Restrictions is really straightforward, and WooCommerce includes a helpful tooltip for more information about each field. Usage Limits Tab The final tab is labelled Usage Limits. This tab lets you restrict how many times your coupon can be used — either per customer, or total uses. I want to restrict my coupon to the first 1,000 users — great for creating a sense of urgency — and limit it to one use per customer, and one PS4 per cart. With this tab configured, my coupon will expire either after my Usage limit or the specified Expiry date — whichever comes first. That’s all there is to it, so when you’re happy hit Publish. Final Thoughts Now when a customer uses my coupon code they will save $25 off the price of a PlayStation 4. Here’s my checkout page before the coupon is applied: And here it is after the coupon is applied, with $25 subtracted from the subtotal and free shipping applied. Awesome, right? As you’ve seen, WooCommerce makes it really easy to create coupons for your eCommerce store, making your prices more attractive to potential buyers. With your coupon created, it’s time to get out there and tell the world about your promotion, to help drive more sales for your online store. The current version of WooCommerce supports relatively basic coupon codes; if you want more advanced coupons, I highly recommending extending WooCommerce with the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin, available for $20 from CodeCanyon. Looking for reliable WooCommerce hosting? Click Here
When I first started using WordPress several years ago, I remember a plugin asking me for a post ID. I thought I was picking up WordPress quite quickly, but this one had me stumped. I could see the name of my post, I could find the URL – but I had no idea how to find the post ID. If you’ve ever had this problem, you’re in luck: today, I’m going to show you exactly where to find the WordPress post ID. Now, many WordPress users don’t know how to find the post ID, and they get by just fine. So why might you need to know it? Usually, it’s a situation like the one above: because a plugin asks for it. But many themes will ask for post IDs during configuration, too. Either way, it’s a good thing to know how to do. How to Find a Post ID in WordPress For me, the quickest and easiest way to find a post ID is done from the All Posts screen — found by logging into the WordPress dashboard and clicking Posts > All Posts. From here, simply hover your mouse over the post you want to find the ID for. Now, take a look in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. See that pop-up box? That contains the post ID. More specifically, the post ID is the number that comes after the “post=” and before the “&“. See what I mean in the above screenshot? In this instance, my post ID is 6706. You can also find the post ID in the WordPress editor, which you get to by clicking on the post you want. When done this way, the post ID is in the address bar. The URL shown will be exactly the same, and the post ID is again sandwiched between the “post=” and the “&.” Both ways are really easy to do, and it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to find the post ID. Page, Category, Tag, Comment, and User IDs But it’s not just posts that are assigned a custom ID number that’s difficult to find. Every page, category, tag, comment, and user ID on your website will also have a unique ID number. You can find these ID numbers in exactly the same way that you found the Post ID numbers. In the case of category ID, simply click Posts > Categories from within the WordPress dashboard. When there, find and hover over the category you want, and you’ll see the URL you want in the bottom left corner, same as before. The category ID is found after “category&tag_ID=” and before “&” as seen in the screen grab above. Alternatively, you could click on the category and find the category ID from the URL. I’ve highlighted it for you in the address bar above. Final Thoughts If you’re struggling to configure a theme or use a plugin because you can’t find a post ID, I hope this short tutorial has helped you out. Although it’s really easy to do, most WordPress users won’t know how to find the post ID, simply because it’s so rarely needed. Remember how it’s done, so if you are ever asked for it, you won’t waste any time finding it. Do you have any questions about finding WordPress Post IDs? Fire away in the comments section below! We can help with flexible Managed WordPress Hosting.
Today we have another well-respected member of the WordPress community answering our questions. Step forward WebDevStudios CEO and co-founder, Brad Williams. You’ve probably heard of WebDevStudios already, right? They’re one of the best-known WordPress design and development companies, they’re heavily involved in the WordPress and BuddyPress core, and their team is behind some of the top-rated WordPress paperbacks — including Brad’s very own Professional WordPress series, aimed at design and plugin developers. In today’s interview, Brad talks openly about how he first became involved with WordPress, how the platform has changed during his time, and some common mistakes inexperienced WordPress users are making. A big thanks to Brad Williams for answering our questions. Here’s the interview in full. For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? My name is Brad Williams and I am the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com. I founded WebDevStudios back in 2008 and specialize in WordPress design and development. I am also the co-author of the Professional WordPress book series and the co-organizer of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Philly. More recently I co-founded a company called AppPresser, which is a mobile app building framework for WordPress. I also host a WordPress centric podcast called the DradCast. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? My first exposure to WordPress was at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference at Chicago in December of 2006. During the conference I noticed everyone had a blog, except me. After the first day of the event I went back to my hotel room, ordered a burger and a beer, and setup WordPress to power my blog at StrangeWork.com. You have to remember back then WordPress was very much a blogging platform. At the time tags didn’t even exist in WordPress core. Even though 2006 was a long time ago, I was actually pretty behind in starting a blog. Blogging became fairly popular in the early 2000s, so I felt like I really missed the bus on starting a blog earlier. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? Over the years I’ve been involved in many different areas of the community. Starting out I was very active in the WordPress IRC channels. I learned a lot from the users who frequented those chat rooms and as I learned more was able to contribute back and help other users. I have also been very active in the WordPress podcast scene. I was an original panel member on the WordPress Weekly podcast at WPTavern.com. I also co-hosted a few podcasts including WP Late Night on WP Candy as well as my current podcast, the DradCast. In 2010 I moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I wanted to find a local WordPress community to join, but at the time there really wasn’t one in Philly. I decided to start the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and help create one! Since then, we have grown to over 1,500 members and have hosted five WordCamp Philly events in our city! It just goes to show, if you can’t find a local WordPress community, get out there and help create one! What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? One of my favorite things about WordPress has always been the community. I’ve made many life-long friends in the WordPress world, including some that now work with me at WebDevStudios. The WordPress community, and open source in general, is a very open and helpful community. It’s all about giving back and helping others, and being a part of this community is the best thing about working with WordPress. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? The WordPress community was obviously much smaller back then. You could count the companies specializing in WordPress on one hand. There were no sites dedicated to WordPress news, no WordPress podcasts, and very few premium themes available. The WordPress world was in its infancy. Being a smaller community meant it was a much tighter community. The community has grown quite a bit since those days. Most people these days, whether in the technology field or not, have heard of WordPress. There are literally thousands (maybe millions!) of people making a living off of WordPress. From freelancers to agencies, the commercial WordPress space has exploded the past few years and is only continuing to grow. WordPress is no longer a blogging platform, it is a full-fledged CMS that is capable of powering any website imaginable. Being so flexible is the primary reason the popularity of WordPress, and the community, has grown so fast over the years. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? The WordPress market is very saturated, and I’m not just talking about premium themes. There are thousands of development and design companies, freelancers, premium products, services, etc for WordPress. My advice would be to find a niche you specialize in and focus on that. Enjoy building websites for radio stations? Focus your business on building websites for radio stations. Focusing on a niche will help you stand out from the crowd and build a name for yourself and your company. It will also open up doors to expand in other niche markets as you grow. Contributing to WordPress is also a great way to get started in WordPress. What better way to learn a platform inside out than to help make it better? There are a number of different ways to contribute to WordPress, so it’s not just for developers. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Many WordPress website owners assume WordPress is a set it and forget it platform. With any software, there are always ongoing maintenance requirements to keep your software updated and secure. WordPress is no different and needs to be updated when new versions are released to verify your website is as secure as it can be. You wouldn’t stop updating Windows when a security update is released, so why stop updating WordPress? I also think many website owners try to go cheap on a critical component of their website, which is hosting. Time and time again I see beautifully built websites hosted on a $5/month shared hosting plan. You spent your time and money to build a beautiful website, so why wouldn’t you want to also spend a little bit more to host with a solid hosting company, especially if that hosting company specializes in WordPress? Hosts like Pagely really take the guesswork out of hosting a WordPress website. Not only do they offer top of the line hosting and support, but they also help with keeping your WordPress website and plugins updated. Spend the money on a quality WordPress host and you will quickly see the ongoing benefits. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? The future of WordPress is looking very exciting! I think we are going to start seeing more and more people using WordPress as an application framework. With the soon to be released REST API, the WordPress dashboard no longer has to be the standard management interface for WordPress. You will be able to easily integrate any system with WordPress, allowing WordPress to handle the display side, and your system of choice the administration side. It will be very fun to see what new concepts people come up with in the future. Final Thoughts A big thanks to Brad Williams for finding the time to answer Pagely’s questions. There’s some golden information in there! In my opinion, the biggest takeaway from today’s interview is Brad’s tip on specialization. These days, the WordPress market is saturated. Countless people make a living from the platform, and there are multiple solutions for just about everything WordPress-related. This makes it incredibly difficult for new developers to get established. If you try to be all things to all people, you’re going to face a long, hard slog if you want recognition as one of the leaders at what you do. If, however, you decide to specialize in a smaller section of the overall market, it’s much easier to make a name for yourself. Competition is still fierce, but you might be competing with a handful of competitors rather than thousands. And, once you have managed to establish yourself in your niche, you’ll find it much easier to make a splash in the wider marketplace, if that’s what you aspire to do. Just because you start small doesn’t mean you can’t grow into something much larger. And with that, let’s wrap up today’s interview. Before we finish, here are the all-important links again. Be sure to check out Brad’s WebDevStudios, AppPresser, and his personal blog — oh, and follow him on Twitter, too! Thanks for reading, see you again next week!
Welcome to another Pagely interview, and today we have the WP Mayor founder, Jean Galea, in the hot-seat. Jean is best known as the founder of the excellent WP Mayor resource. It’s one of the best places for WordPress tutorials, learning about the best plugins/themes, and also more general tips for aspiring webmasters. Jean also provides some awesome tips over on his personal blog and he’s well worth following on Twitter, @jeangalea. In today’s interview, we’ll tap into Jean’s years of WordPress knowledge and expertise. We’ll be talking about the best way for new WordPress users to get started, how to avoid common beginner pitfalls, and also some of the best things about working with WordPress. As always, we really appreciate Jean’s time. Read on for a really insightful set of answers! For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I founded and currently run WP Mayor and WP RSS Aggregator. WP Mayor is a WordPress resource site and WP RSS Aggregator is a freemium plugin that lets you import RSS content from any type of website into WordPress. On both these projects I am lucky to count on a fantastic team that help me in making my vision a reality. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I stumbled on WordPress while still a student at University. I used to work as a freelance web developer on the side to help finance my education. After a brief stint with Joomla I switched to WordPress, attracted by its promise of an easy installation and straightforward theme customisations. Soon after graduating I teamed up with a friend of mine to form a WordPress agency in Malta which I ran successfully before moving on to blogging and product development. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? At WP Mayor I’ve acted as a WordPress evangelist by teaching people how to use WordPress as well as reviewing top plugins, themes and services. I’ve also had the pleasure of speaking at WordCamps and also mentoring other entrepreneurs who are building WordPress products. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? Thanks to WordPress I have been able to build three profitable businesses and achieve my dreams of travelling around the world while working at the same time. I’m therefore very grateful for the opportunities that WordPress has opened up for me. Beyond giving me the ability to live the digital nomad lifestyle, however, I’d have to say the best thing about working with WordPress has been the community. I’ve made many long-lasting friendships through my involvement with WordPress, and I’m very thankful for such an open and friendly community. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? The most noticeable difference would definitely have to be the size of the community. In recent years WordPress has grown really rapidly. This increase in market share has been by and large a positive thing. It is now easier to find help with WordPress problems, and there are way more options when it comes to themes and plugins nowadays then there were when I started out. In my early days with WordPress I also had to work hard to convince prospective clients that they should trust WordPress and open source software in general. I believe WordPress development agencies nowadays have a much easier job as things have changed and business owners typically have already have heard of WordPress and its virtues. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? My advice would be to start building something right away. You don’t need to read long user manuals or loads of tutorials before creating your own WordPress website. It’s best to learn by doing as it really is quite straightforward to get going. Nowadays there are learning resources in every form: video training, podcasts, blogs etc. Just choose your preferred way of learning and get going. The same applies for those developers who want to get started with themes and plugins. Since themes and plugins are open source, it’s very easy to dissect what the top developers are doing and learn from them. What do you think are the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? The biggest mistake I see site owners making is not taking security seriously enough. Unfortunately many WordPress websites are hacked every year. By and large the fault doesn’t lie with WordPress core itself but rather one of the following facets of a site: plugins, themes or the hosting platform. Hence not being extra careful with any of those three aspects can be a very costly mistake. As a website owner, you should use well-coded plugins and themes and keep them updated. I recommend weekly updates, although monthly updates should also be sufficient. Moreover, choosing a top web host will ensure that your website performs at its best. Managed WordPress hosts are a fantastic option as they take care of caching, platform security and backups. Apart from that they also tend to offer the best customer support since they have working knowledge with WordPress, while other generic hosts might not have that expertise. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? In the immediate future the REST API will change the way we think about building projects with WordPress. It will make WordPress a much more flexible platform that can power an even wider range of applications. I would like to see more people in the WordPress community look beyond the comfortable confines of WordPress. In practical terms this will involve using more modern development practices, attending international non-WordPress conferences, and becoming better entrepreneurs. This will ensure that WordPress will not lose its relevance in the grand scheme of things. We are already at a stage where we’re realising that young developers are being attracted to other more cutting edge technologies so we must make a conscious effort to modernise some aspects of the project and reach out to the general web development community. Final Thoughts Once again, a big thanks to Jean for taking time out to answer our questions. As Jean points out, WordPress is an easy platform to get started with. Don’t waste time dragging your heels: dive in, and be prepared to make mistakes — it’s the best way to learn the ins and outs of the platform. And, if you do get stuck, there’s an abundance of WordPress resources out there to help you find your bearings, and you can find tutorials in just about any format — including Jean’s very own WordPress resource, WP Mayor. Let’s wrap things up, as always, with those all-important links. Be sure to check out Jean’s two main businesses, WP Mayor and WP RSS Aggregator plugin. If you’re looking for a more personal flavor, check out his always-informative personal blog, and follow him on Twitter! That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading everyone!
In this week’s edition of 8 Questions, Pagely was fortunate enough to interview one of the most talented WordPress plugin developers around, Pippin Williamson. For those of you unfamiliar with Pippin, where have you been? Pippin is best known as the founder of Pippins Plugins, but he can reel off a huge list of well-respected plugins. These include all-in-one solutions for digital eCommerce (Easy Digital Downloads), membership sites (Restrict Content Pro), and affiliate scheme management (AffiliateWP). Despite his busy schedule, he also manages to stay active on Twitter — follow him @pippinsplugins. With this in mind, we’re very lucky to talk to him today, as Pippin gives advice to new WordPress users, helps you avoid common mistakes, and also shares how his own career has developed so far. An enormous thanks to Pippin for providing some of the most honest and insightful answers we’ve had so far. Here’s what he had to say. Full Disclosure. Pippin is a customer of Pagely and one of our featured Brand Ambassadors. For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? Computers and the internet have always been an active part of my life. My father has been a computer programmer for more than 30 years so we always had computers in the house. If I recall, we were one of the very first houses in our area to get dial up internet when it was first becoming available in the early 1990s. The prevalence of computers and other tech gadgets gave me an easy (and perhaps obvious) route into an internet-oriented career. I began programming in in my early teens and was working as a freelance web developer by 18 or 19. Some of my first programming experience came from a language called NCQ (Not Quite C) that was used for programming robots built with Lego Mindstorms. That led me into C, C++, and then on to web languages such as PHP, which came during my introduction into WordPress phase. As much as I’ve always been a tech fanboy, however, my heart and soul are really in the outdoors and working with my hands. There is a level of satisfaction that comes with crafting something with your own muscles and nerve endings that simply cannot be equaled in the digital world. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I began getting interested in WordPress around 2008 while building some of my first websites for clients. This was when I was in my first few years at the University of Kansas and web development served as an after-school side project for me. It mostly funded my coffee shelf. Over the course of perhaps six months, I slowly acquainted myself with plugin development and started building small plugins that I released both commercially and for free on WordPress.org. The first plugin I built became a very slippery slope for me. Today I’ve written over 200 distinct plugins and run three separate companies all funded entirely from commercial plugin sales. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? I began as a theme developer (terrifying thought considering my utter lack of any design skills). Mostly I built custom themes for client projects but I did at one point release a free theme that was available for a few years before being discontinued. After learning the ropes through theme development, I moved on to building plugins, which is where I have kept my focus ever since. As part of my plugin development focus, I also became involved with the plugin review team for WordPress.org, meaning I help manage the plugins that are submitted to the repository. Today there are nearly 40,000 plugins in the repository and somewhere between 20-50 new ones requested every single day. Outside of plugin development, I’m an active attendee, speaker, and sponsor at WordCamps around the country (going global in September!). While it does not happen as frequently as I would like, I also contribute to WordPress core by writing and testing patches for bugs and new improvements. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? The opportunity to make lifelong friends with people around the world. There have been so many other great things but truly what matters is people. The people I’ve had the opportunity to connect with through working with WordPress is simply astounding. While we tend to focus more on the bad, ugly, and dramatic events, the relationships we build day to day are the ones that really shape our lives for years to come. I could choose to leave WordPress tomorrow, but I wouldn’t be leaving the people I’ve met along the way behind. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? It has matured a lot. Every community will have tough times and every community will have periods of strife, but in general I think we have grown substantially, in many ways. We have obviously grown in size as WordPress continues to eat up more and more of the web’s market share, but we have also developed into a more mature platform that people can feel safe building their businesses on. Three years ago, I would have been reluctant to hire a team of support technicians and developers to help me run my plugin company, but today that’s the reality, and it’s the reality for a lot of companies throughout the WordPress world. I believe we have also begun doing a much better job at branching outside of the WordPress community. Most days we live in a bubble–a comfortable one (usually), but a bubble nonetheless. There is still a long ways to go, but I do believe we are getting there. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? It really depends on what area they’re going into, but the first piece that applies to everyone is to follow your own path. Just because one person says to do something one way does not mean you have to. Just because one team is successful on one way does not mean that you must follow their lead to also be successful. If I were to start over, I would try and hire team members sooner. I spent a year of my life really struggling to make it through each day because I was so overloaded with work. My business was thriving but my personal happiness and mental health were seriously deteriorating. Bringing on other people to help share the load is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? I have a two part answer to this: Not updating WordPress and plugins on their site leaving them open to vulnerabilities and bugs. This is exacerbated anytime site owners experience upgrade problems due to poorly built plugin updates. Site owners have a fear of updating, but it’s not their fault. To alleviate update fears, plugin developers absolutely must take backwards compatibility as a critical objective. If plugin developers continue to push out updates to make breaking changes or cause problems with sites, the site owners will never, ever get comfortable enough to trust updates. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I expect we will see a much tighter integration with 3rd party services and even external devices. There is no reason WordPress should be confined to your computer’s web browser. Over the next few years, I fully expect to see a slew of mobile apps make their way into the WordPress ecosystem that bring an additional level of integration between the software that runs our websites and the devices we use to consume and produce information. Final Thoughts Once again, a big thank you to Pippin for providing us with a great set of answers. Pippin makes an interesting point about expanding your team. Although it’s normal to think that you can do everything yourself, beyond a certain point, working alone actually restricts your business’s growth — not to mention the side effects from working too hard. Remember: Expanding your team is a fundamental part of being in business. Relinquishing control is difficult, but with plenty of talented developers out there, your business will still be in good hands. If you feel like your business has plateaued, perhaps it’s time to inject some new blood into your business — it could be just what you need to take it to the next level. If you’ve enjoyed reading Pippin’s answers, be sure to check out his plugin collection — you can find links to all his plugins over on the PippinsPlugins website. I also recommend following him on Twitter, @PippinsPlugins. Thanks for reading, we’ll be back with another interview next week!
Nothing enhances a brand more than a great customer experience. There are many ways to achieve this: a great product and eye-catching website for starters, but also an impeccable customer service — something that’s often overlooked. But how do you provide great customer service on a website? A responsive email team, perhaps, but nothing beats a real-time conversation with a real human. I’m talking, of course, about live chat. Not only does adding live chat to your website increase sales — it’s the quickest way to neutralize buyer objections — but it also allows you to provide great aftercare, so users can get the most from your products and services. That means more satisfied customers and more glowing reviews, and this will boost sales down the line, too. By now, I hope you’re sold on the benefits of live chat. Today I want to show you how to add live chat to your website, using Pure Chat. Getting Started To install the Pure Chat plugin, navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for ‘Pure Chat,’ then click Install Now on the first plugin returned. After installation, click to Activate Plugin. Next, head to the Pure Chat menu item, and click on the Pick a Widget button. Now you’ll need to sign up for a Pure Chat account. This is completely free of charge and should take no more than a minute. After signing up for Pure Chat, the live chat functionality will automatically activate on your website — access your website to test this out. The default Pure Chat window is stylish and commands attention, making it a great way to encourage visitors to interact with you. Now that you know everything is working, you can use Pure Chat to assist your visitors. Your conversations are handled from a dedicated dashboard — not from within the WordPress dashboard. The interface is really clean, however, and it’s really intuitive to use, so you should feel comfortable in a matter of minutes. Customizing Pure Chat You can customize your Pure Chat window by navigating to the Manage tab in the top-right corner, then clicking Chat Widgets > Customize. Here, you can customize the appearance of your chat window. Here are some of the customization options available to you: Two styles — minimal and classic Infinite colors Position on the screen Text Type — four types of chat window 26 animations 23 images — or upload your own Positioning of the image This means you can create very different looking chat windows. Try to create something that fits with your brand image. Using the many tabs at the top of the screen, you can also configure the appearance of the in chat window, which visitors will see during your virtual conversations. There’s also a Trigger tab, which lets you specify the criteria for a chat window to open automatically — you can select time-based triggers, or page-based triggers by specifying internal URLs. When you’re done, just click Save. The changes are applied to your website automatically. From within the Manage tab, you can also look at your live chat statistics, view transcripts, create new users, and create canned responses to often-asked questions. Live Chat Functionality You can chat with your customers from the Pure Chat dashboard. The live chat functionality is activated whenever a chat operator is available — to set your status as available, just click on the Unavailable button at the top of the screen. This will change your status to Available. Now when a visitor accesses your website, they can click on your chat window to communicate in real-time with you. When a message is received, Pure Chat will play a notification sound. Click on Incoming Chats to view your received messages. Now you can use the Pure Chat interface like an instant messaging service to talk directly to your visitors. This is what the chat looks like from your visitors’ perspective. Final Thoughts If you want to add live chat functionality to your WordPress website, Pure Chat is a great option. I’ve tested out a few different live chat plugins, and Pure Chat has been my favorite by far. The service is easy to use — on the front- and back-end — and the chat windows look really stylish, with lots of customization capabilities. If you want to test drive Pure Chat, you can use it for up to 15 chats per month free of charge — this might be enough for low-traffic websites. If you want an unlimited number of chats, Pure Chat is available from $4.99/month. Are you using Pure Chat? Share your experiences in the comments below!
Today we get another insight into the Argentinian WordPress community, courtesy of QuadroIdeas founder Javier Schvindlerman. As well as running his premium theme shop, Javier is also heavily involved in the WordPress community in Argentina, making the long-overdue Buenos Aires WordCamp a reality at the end of May. In today’s interview, Javier talks all things WordPress — his background, his involvement with the WordPress community, how the community has evolved, and the direction he thinks it’s headed. As always, I want to say a big “thanks” to Javier for finding the time to answer our questions. Let’s get on with the interview! For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? Sure! I’m a developer/stage manager/musician. I was born in Argentina, spent many years living in Israel, and I’m currently living in Buenos Aires again. I’ve always had many different occupations, but I spend most of my day involved with WordPress. Together with Mailen Knoblovits we co-founded and run QuadroIdeas, a little theme shop selling handcrafted, premium WordPress themes. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? Well, I’ve always been involved with web technologies. I went to a technical high school and started programming on Pascal when I was 13 years old. I think you are very lucky when you get to be technically challenged from a young age, and you need to solve conflicts by means of tools you don’t really know how to use yet. By 2008, when dealing with a website for one of my (then) current projects, a web tutorial lead me to WordPress. I used it to build a site in a matter of minutes, and was completely sold. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? Since we create themes for a wide spectrum of people, I do a lot of user support. We deal with complex requirements from advanced developers that are trying to make super cool stuff with some part of a theme, and we also help customers that barely know what the Dashboard is and are struggling to create a menu. Also, these last two years we’ve been heavily involved in growing the WordPress community here in Argentina. We came to a WordPress-anniversary-meetup first, and immediately felt we needed to help there. The community has been growing beautifully with more and more people joining and sharing knowledge and experience. Last year we discussed the possibility of hosting a WordCamp in Buenos Aires after many years without one. And after a lot (a lot!) of work, it became real! We’ve spent the first half of this year co-organizing it, mostly, with the great folks at @NiceThemes. It was hard and exhausting, but extremely rewarding. 🙂 What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? For me, it has to be the way WordPress empowers people. Because having a web presence is so important, you need to be online and have a space of your own to make a lot of stuff happen. I’m not saying you absolutely need to have a website — we know that isn’t true. But having your own online real estate can make a difference. In that sense, WordPress can open doors for someone who otherwise wouldn’t have the means to. The ability to create an online display for your ideas, your products, or whatever you have to say, is huge. At the end, technologies aside, I think that’s what the whole WordPress ecosystem is contributing to. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? It has gotten bigger, for sure. And wider. I guess the wider it gets the more varied the needs of the community get, right? WordPress is far from being a “blog platform” today, and the users and developer communities behind it reflect it. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? I don’t think I would do anything different. During my time working with WordPress, I’ve used it to run personal sites, I’ve developed client projects, and I’ve been building commercial themes for a while now. Whatever you can do to keep learning will help you enormously on the next part of the road. There’s definitely a learning curve when you begin, especially if you are not PHP oriented. But it’s an easy one. If you are just starting with WordPress, I’d try and think that everything you want to do with it is possible. You just need to find the right way to do it. There is an infinity of online forums, Facebook groups, blogs, etc. which can help you if you don’t have the answers yet. Just go ahead and try to do it. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Can’t think of anything in particular right now. 🙂 What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? The future of WordPress is looking bright, that’s for sure. I’d like to see a more open discussion about what the current needs of the whole user spectrum are. Being a community mostly run by developers (top notch developers) that spend valuable time making the core what it is, I think that sometimes it’s easy to miss the big picture of what the end user is trying to do with it. Sure, educating users is fundamental, but a lot of times we on the other side can learn much more, as with any other case, just by listening and watching. Final Thoughts Once again, huge appreciation to Javier for answering our questions! As we discussed at the end of Juan’s interview, it’s great to see WordPress thriving in all corners of the globe. This doesn’t happen by accident — it’s reliant on individuals pulling together to grow their local WordPress community. Just because a WordCamp isn’t coming to a city near you doesn’t mean it has to be this way forever. As Javier and Juan have proved, if you work hard enough, you can make these events happen — it’s really inspiring stuff. Before we finish, I strongly recommend that you head over to QuadroIdeas to check out some of Javier’s beautiful, handcrafted themes! That’s all for now, though; thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
Over the last few years, the premium WordPress product market has gone from strength to strength. These days, it really is possible for top developers to earn six- or even seven-figures a year by selling their premium themes and plugins. This has led to a surge of new products hitting the market, with lots of new developers looking for their piece of the pie. Unfortunately, many of them are left disappointed, with sales falling well short of their expectations. What gives? Why are some developers super-successful while others struggle to earn a basic living? (Hint: it’s not just an issue of quality.) The problem is that many developers have no idea how to sell their products — if the community is unaware of your products, how do you expect to make any money? If this describes you, you’re in luck: today, I’ll be sharing four tips to help commercial WordPress developers sell their first 100 products. 1. Freemium Business Model If you’re launching your very first product, people have probably never heard of you. As you can imagine, this makes building momentum ten times more difficult! People are unlikely to drop big money on a product they’ve never heard of, built by an unknown developer — not unless the product is truly groundbreaking and exceptional. They are, however, likely to test out a product if it won’t cost them anything. Whether you’re selling themes or plugins, try to release a basic version of your product. Just remove one or two premium features, then submit it to the relevant WordPress directory — this one for themes, this one for plugins. Impress people with the ‘Lite’ version of your product, and they’re far more likely to shell out for the full version. 2. Sell on the Big Marketplaces If you sell your themes/plugins exclusively on your website, you have two obstacles to overcome: Attracting people to your website, and Convincing them to make the purchase. You can make your life much easier by going to a place where you know big groups of buyers congregate — namely, ThemeForest (themes) and CodeCanyon (plugins). It’s the same reason big manufacturers all sell their products on Amazon — there’s a ready-made customer base in place. Sure, you’ll still have to work hard to stand out from the competition, but it’s far easier to get noticed. After that, you can focus on perfecting your product page to generate conversions. This might not be the most popular point, as Envato take between 30% and 50% of an exclusive author’s earnings, depending on total sales. With such a large customer base, however, selling your products on the biggest WordPress marketplaces can still be very lucrative. In fact, CodeCanyon’s best-selling plugin, Visual Composer, has been bought nearly 80,000 times at $33 a pop — that’s around $2.6 million in revenue. On ThemeForest, the figures are even more impressive, with the best-selling theme, Avada, shipping over 145,000 themes at $58 — that’s nearly $8.5 million in revenue. Truly eye-watering statistics, right? But could these developers have earnt anything like those figures by going alone? Not a chance. Would you rather earn 100% of a smaller number (or zero), or 50%-70% of a much bigger number? That’s a decision that only you can make, but the Envato marketplaces certainly deserve consideration. 3. Start an Affiliate Program You might not be the best marketer in the world, so why not attract marketing talent to do the hard work for you? By launching a generous affiliate scheme, top marketers and blogs might pick up your products and advertise them for you — in return, they’ll receive a commission for each sale they drive. You’ll still have to put yourself out there to attract your first affiliates, but if you’ve got a product that’s proven to sell, this strategy can snowball. If you want to manage an affiliate program from within the WordPress dashboard, consider using a plugin like AffiliateWP — part of the Pippin’s Plugins family, which also includes Easy Digital Downloads. 4. Reach Out to WordPress Blogs and Bloggers Where do the people most likely to buy your themes/plugins already hang out? That’s right: the existing WordPress blogs. If you offer a review copy of your product, many top blogs will be happy to put you in the shop window by publishing an in-depth review. This is a great way to show potential buyers your product’s main features, as well as providing a demonstration of how to use the product. My advice is to contact every top WordPress blog you can think of, including the writers that regularly contribute to them. If you cast your net wide enough, you’re bound to get some interest, and this is often all it takes to start building some momentum. Final Thoughts The famous line from Field of Dreams — “if you build it, they will come” — just doesn’t apply to business in the real world. I’m sure there are many WordPress developers building exceptional themes and plugins that are earning nowhere near what their talent deserves. Remember: When it comes to business, a great product on its own isn’t enough. You also need an effective promotional strategy. Every developer will promote his/her products differently, but the four tips in today’s post are easy to implement and general enough to be a solid starting point for any developers looking to launch a commercial WordPress business. Now it’s over to you. Do you have any more tips you’d like to add? Then share your expertise in the comments section below! Featured image courtesy of GotCredit.
Welcome to another edition of Pagely’s 8 Question series. This week, we have Juan F. Aldasoro in the hotseat. Juan’s biggest contribution to the WordPress community is through his excellent theme shop, NiceThemes. Beyond this, he is heavily involved in the Argentinian WordPress community, helping to organize several important events. As always, be sure to follow him on Twitter, @juanfraa. The interview will follow the usual format, with eight questions relating to Juan’s WordPress background, how his involvement in the community has changed, and the direction he thinks WordPress is heading. A big thanks to Juan for answering our questions. This is what he had to say: For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I was born in Argentina, three decades ago. In my teens I started experimenting with design and programming. In 2007 I started an intense romance with WordPress, and I have worked mostly with it ever since. Today, I create WordPress premium products at NiceThemes. I also co-organized the recent WordCamp in Buenos Aires with my friends at WP Argentina, where we try to run different events and organize the local community. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I first became involved online, in the forums, learning. Although Buenos Aires held 3 WordCamps prior to my first proper interaction with the community, by the time I wanted to attend a meetup or a WordCamp, the local community was nearly dead. My first proper interaction with the WordPress community was back in 2012 during WordCamp UK in Edinburgh. At that time I was traveling around Europe and thought it would be a great idea to attend an event of this sort. And I was right. After that day, I started dreaming about having something similar in my city. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? I’ve helped with Spanish translations, helped people around the dot org forums, contributed code, educated my customers, and created a plugin to help Latin American WordCamps to process their payments. I’ve also done public speaking, co-organized local meetups, and the recent WordCamp in Buenos Aires. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? The best thing behind any community is the people in it. WordPress is not the exception. There’s a lot of nice and talented people, and you can learn new things every single day. The doors are open, so you can be part of the tool that is used by a quarter of the internet, too. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? It’s larger. There are more resources, information, events. There are more debates about the future. The market share has grown, a lot. As a result, there are more options when it comes to creating things on top. There’s a commercial ecosystem. I think the essence is still the same. I am of the idea that the main focus should be to maintain that essence. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? It depends on the profile. I think a generic answer to this question would be: Try to get involved. If I were starting over again I would try to get involved more in core and the community. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? I think we’re not doing a good job educating website owners and newcomers. They are always looking for the ultimate solution, and there’s no such thing. We should try to spend some time explaining why is that there’s no ultimate solution. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I would like to continue seeing balance and debate around the community. I would also like to see the rise of strong regional communities outside mainstream. Internationalization will play a key role in the future of WordPress and its quest on gaining market share. Speaking of technical aspects, it’s pretty obvious that JavaScript and a strong mobile support will be part of the future. I also see more enterprise development/support outside the US and Europe. Final Thoughts Another big thanks to Juan for answering our questions! As always, they made a great read. It’s great to see the WordPress thriving all over the world. A quick look on the WordCamp website shows me that there are upcoming events in Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, South Korea, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Peru. In other words, wherever you live, there’s a good chance there’s a WordCamp coming somewhere near you. This gives you the perfect opportunity to get out there, learn more about WordPress, and involve yourself in your local WordPress community. As Juan (and many of our other interviewees) have suggested, this is a great place to start. Before we finish, here are the all-important links to Juan’s theme shop, NiceThemes, and his Twitter profile. Thanks for reading everyone! We’ll be back with another interview next week!
Welcome to the latest Pagely 8 Questions interview! For this week’s edition, we’re lucky enough to have Tom McFarlin answering our questions. Before we start, be sure to follow Tom on Twitter, and also check out his latest WordPress thoughts, tips, and tutorials on his personal blog. Tom’s biggest claim to fame in the community, however, is his highly regarded custom WordPress development service, Pressware. In today’s interview, we’ll be talking all things WordPress with Tom — including his involvements in the WordPress community, his best experiences of working with WordPress, and the direction he thinks the platform is heading. As always, we’re hugely grateful that Tom was able to answer our questions. Here’s what he had to say. For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I’m a self-employed WordPress developer who runs a small shop called Pressware. I focus primarily on custom solutions for clients — though I’ve dabbled in building products and selling them, I’ve always come back to contract work as I enjoy the challenge of solving problems unique to different industries. I also blog daily about a variety of things (though generally WordPress related), and you can typically find me throughout the day sharing random things on Twitter. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? My first experience with WordPress was back in college. The school was looking for a couple of students to blog about their day-to-day life as a student at the school and so I opted to do so — I enjoyed writing, had maintained a blog back on BlogSpot (back when it was BlogSpot), and thought it sounded like something fun to do. I forget the exact version of WordPress that I used at the time, but it was back during the Kubrick days. My first experience with working with modifying the theme came in the form of basically messing around with the core theme files — I didn’t know anything about child themes at the time, so I just used what PHP I knew to make the theme do what I wanted. Once I graduated, I finished the blog and went to work for a major internet company, primarily working as a software engineer in .NET. During my free time, I still maintained a blog on WordPress, but it was generally treated as a public notebook of things that I was learning in my career. After I opted to go self-employed, I divided my time between Rails and WordPress and eventually went full on WordPress and that’s where I’ve been ever since. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? I’ve worked on everything from free themes, commercial themes, custom themes, free plugins, commercial plugins, custom plugins, and even building web applications on top of WordPress. I’ve attended meet ups, WordCamps, participated in podcasts, and have spoken on a variety of topics, and generally have tried to stay as involved in the community as possible given the demands of day-to-day life, as well. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? For me, it’s really been the people with whom I’ve worked and the problems I’ve had the opportunity to solve. It’s really fun to learn different industries, their needs, and what they need as a solution, and be able to work with them to provide them with what they need in order to get the project done correctly. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? This is tough to say. I mean, I think people have consistently been opinionated about what they do and don’t like when it comes to WordPress and all things tertiary to it. That will probably always be the case, and as much fun — or not — as that can be, I think that it does help drive some of the decision making that goes into the core application. As far as the development community is concerned, more shops have popped up — some large, some small — and the general economy around the application has grown tremendously. What started off as a blogging platform has moved into something far more mature — we’re doing more with WordPress now than I think we would have ever thought possible just, say, eight years ago. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? This is tough to say because I think it takes time to really find what your interests are. Is it design? Is it themes? Is it plugins? Is it code reviews? Is it building things? I mean, you really have to experience a plethora of what the application and the economy has to offer before settling on the aspects that cater to you and your customers most. And that’s probably the general advice I’d give to anyone — participate in a number of the available projects (after all, they’re all open source), blog about your experiences and try to get others to chime in with their experiences, advice, and so on, and then continue to repeat that until you find exactly what it is that sits as close to the intersection of what you love to do and what provides a living or side income (whatever your goal). What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? That’s a tough call because I think that it requires me to make a generalization and I’m really not a fan of doing that. With that said, I’m a big proponent of keeping the presentation separate from the functionality, but that’s developer-speak. It’s jargon to everyone else. Therefore, the people who are buying these one-stop-do-all-the-things themes don’t really get the theme lock-in that they’re experiencing. Who knows how other plugins will play along with the theme they’re using and who knows how easy it will be to customize the theme to their liking once purchased. Often times, I think there is a disconnect between what the marketing of a theme offers and then what the customer experiences when they install and begin working with the theme. That’s our fault — that is, the developers and the designers. We’re showing what can be done with the theme but aren’t showing how it can be done with the theme. That’s a problem that we need to address sooner rather than later. Perhaps easier to access manuals, videos, and other educational material. Otherwise, someone purchases a theme and then they still have to go hire someone to help them get the theme to do what they want based on what they’ve seen. What a poor experience that creates. Anyway, I know I’ve not really answered your question because I don’t think it’s really the problem of the website owners, per se, it’s the solutions we’re marketing to the website owners and then they’re left with problems that they don’t know how to fix. And though that’s kind of a backwards answer, that’s the one I’m going to stick with because it’s something that I believe is so prevalent, and such a problem. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? In short, the future of WordPress is really going to be paved with what’s possible with the REST API. I think seeing what we’re going to be able to do with “headless WordPress” or just being able to connect to WordPress and talk to it without having to actually work with the dashboard or the back-end (whatever term you prefer) is going to be really, really cool. In terms of what I’d like to see: I’d love to see more web applications built on top of WordPress – not just sites or themes or plugins. I’d like to see more full-fledged web apps built on top of the platform. And though that’s what I’d like to see, I think we’re still quite a while away from actually seeing that happen. It’s coming, though :). Final Thoughts Once again, an enormous thankyou to Tom for finding the time to answer our questions. I think that Tom’s point about the gap between theme marketing and actual user experience is a good one, and something that’s not often discussed. Aftercare is often just as important as the product itself, and thorough documentation is a great way for you to differentiate yourself, by helping your users get the most out of your products. With all the effort that goes into developing WordPress themes and plugins, it wouldn’t take much to produce video tutorials demonstrating all the main features — and that would mean more happy customers, more positive reviews, and more sales. Let’s wrap things up by sharing Tom’s links again. If you have a custom development project, I’m sure Tom’s highly regarded Pressware will be able to help. You should also check out his personal blog where he shares WordPress thoughts, tips, and tutorials on a daily basis. He’s also very active on Twitter, @tommcfarlin. I hope you enjoyed the interview, and I’ll see you again next week!
