Meetup Meeting Notes Archives - Austin WordPress Meetup

WooConf Debrief and a Member Discussion

Meetup Meeting Notes, WordPress for Business, eCommerce

For two days store owners and WordPress developers interested in growing their knowledge of WooCommerce gathered in Austin for workshops and networking.

WooCommerce Ninjas shared tips and tricks with developers,and store owners had the opportunity to learn how to use the software to its full potential from eCommerce experts and other successful store owners.

Joshua Shipsey and Adrienne shared their impressions and take-aways from their WooConf experience. Joshua shared his impressions from a developer’s perspective and Adrienne talked about what she learbed as a store owner who uses WooCommerce.

The last half of the meetup was a lively member discussion about what topics we would like the WooConference meetup to address during the next several months and if there any local WooCommerce presenters they would like the organizers to approach for talks or Workshops. We have a white board full of suggestions and will be posting the upcoming meeting agendas as soon as we can organize them and tap our targeted presenters.

Here are the links from Joshua’s slide deck:

WooConf site: https://wooconf.com/

Link to Peep Laja’s website and free ebook
http://conversionxl.com/

Link to an eBook by WP Engine, Crowd Favorite, and Chirs Lema distributed at WooConf

https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WP-EBK-ScalingWooCommerce-v06-PUB.pdf

Structuring and Developing a Winning Content Strategy

WordPress Beginners, Meetup Meeting Notes, Content Development and Management

Many of our WordPress Beginners have asked for a dedicated session to address the best approach to developing a winning content strategy. Nick and Sandi Batik led this month’s discussion. They reviewed a few tools to help you get the most from your pages and posts. Nick demonstrated some navigation tips and an internal linking structure to help build effective information architecture. The session concluded with 5-step system to write copy that consistently attracts your target clients and organically build SEO.

Here is the link to the slide deck:

How to structure a content strategy that works from Pleiades Publishing Services / Hands On WordPress Training

Guide to Writing a Winning Proposal

Tips and Tools, WordPress for Business, Meetup Meeting Notes, Deep Dive Discussions

An on-going discussion about starting and building a successful, freelance WordPress business…

Last month we discussed finding clients for your Freelance business. At this month’s Deep Dive Discussion, Nick and Sandi Batik demonstrated tools and processes that help you write a winning proposal, even if you are an introvert.

Right-brained or left brained, creative or analytical, the Introverted Freelancer needs to suss out what problem your client is asking you to solve. The discussion focused on defining the client’s problem and converting that problem statement into a proposal that defines how you will meet the clients’ needs and help improve their bottom line.

There is the link to the notes and slide deck for the Austin WordPress Deep Dive Discussion Meetup April 11. 2016:

Freelancer’s Guide to Writing a Winning Proposal -1
https://handsonwp.com/freelancers-guide-writing-winning-proposal/

Freelancer’s Guide to Writing a Winning Proposal-2
https://handsonwp.com/introverted-freelancers-guide-writing-winning-proposal/

Finding Your Company’s Voice

WordPress for Business, Tips and Tools, Meetup Meeting Notes

The March WordPress Practitioner’s Meetup was the first in a series of “The Business of WordPress” topics our member’s have requested. Our WP Practitioners attendees are about evenly divided between business owners and mangers who use WordPress daily in their businesses, and WordPress Freelancers, Developers and Implementors who are building and maintaining WordPress sites for businesses. When the organizers read your topic requests, we approached small business specialist, Sarah Flaherty about presenting to our group.

Sarah’s tag line is, “Let me think outside the box for you,” illustrates her love for helping emerging businesses and her creativity. In today’s world, there is no unique business, there is only uniqueness. Finding your unique voice is the first and foremost need of a successful business or Freelancer.

Your firm’s voice is the singlemost important business fundamental, and it is often ignored in our WordPress Community of Developers and Designers. Consumers no longer shop locally, they shop globally on their terms. This makes competition to get their attention, and keep it, fierce. You must be in constant communication with your clients in order to maintain sales and growth. However, you can’t achieve this through a great logo and a fabulous website. You must engage directly with your clients, and this requires you to have a curated voice; consumers flock to you and become your loyal evangelists when they hear and experience your care of them consistently when they know your firm’s personality, what and why it’s passionate about, and what they can always count on.

Sarah C. Flaherty of LUV, LLC will briefly discuss the need to find your voice, how to shape it, and what to do with it once you’ve found it with a focus on social media. This presentation will be followed by a group project that allows you to take a company from conception to initial client communication and will show you the importance of aligning your company’s mission statement with your visuals and content. This will help you better understand your need to content curate to find your firm’s unique voice and how to use it going forward.

With some of Sarah’s tips and tricks you’ll find that not only will you better understand the hows and whys of what you want to do, but you’ll be better able to focus potential clients’ attention on your business, and keep it. The WPATX Organizers want to thank Sarah Flaherty for a wonderful presentation and a fun workshop to demonstrate refining and channeling our business brand. Thanks to all our members who displayed amazing creativity and sense of humor -Sarah made learning fun!

Below please find a PDF of Sarah’s Slides and her contact info if you have any questions.

How to Find Your Company Voice

Intro to WordPress as an Application

Meetup Meeting Notes, Intermediate WordPress

It’s really an exciting time to be a WordPress practitioner right now, particularly as WordPress enters into a big transitional period with the introduction of the WordPress REST API!

As a practitioner, you’re used to approaching a need, whether for your own business or that of a clients, and then thinking of ways to use WordPress to meet the need through the use of themes, plugins, or other tools to make it happen. And the same goes with into mind when thinking of WordPress as an application as well.

Rarely does a client say in the first client meeting, “I want this exact plugin installed and for you to use these specific post types!” Haha no, instead they say, “I want to see who’s visiting my site”, or “Help! My website’s running slow!” And you geniuses go to work thinking of techniques to make it happen using existing tools, plugins, etc.

Transition

So what’s all this talk about a “transition”? The best way to begin describing the significance of this transition is to look back at where WordPress has been. Most of you have heard this, so I won’t go into all the old details, but in summary WordPress started as a blogging tool. At the time, it was still a crazy concept you could have your own personal stream of information you could control and post freely to.

Then came the introduction of post types and multisite, which was really at the core of transitioning WordPress from solely a blogging tool, to a full fledged CMS capable of storing and using vast amounts of content. For most of us in the room, this is what attracted us to WordPress in the beginning. Same with the introduction of a easy-to-use blogging platform, now it’s crazy to even imagine sites without a CMS at this point!

But now the next big transition is already under way into an application, and it’s equally exciting in the way it’ll increase capacity for WordPress and unlock new use cases to use the open source, community driven program we’ve all grown to love.

Application

First things first, if you’re like me when I first heard application, I immediate thought of iPhone or Android apps. But when I refer to applications, I’m referring to the system and data that runs a variety of mobile apps or websites.

See when opening up an app on your phone, the app itself isn’t actually where all the data lies. And when we think about it, it’s pretty obvious. All the tweets in the world aren’t stored in my phone…same with all the Airbnb listings, or Netflix shows. The mobile app as we call it, are merely the “skin”, or the front facing client we use to access, edit, add, or delete data.

Take Twitter for example. This is what Twitter looks like to us. (favorite, user profile picture, reply and compose buttons, follow users, etc)

But in reality, the screenshot below is what a tweet’s data actually looks like.

Even their front-end site, twitter.com, doesn’t actually store all the data, it’s just a skin designed and developed for us to interact with the application as well.

So now that we’ve unlearned and relearned what an application is within the context of APIs and the future of WordPress, let’s add another relearned word to our new vocabulary. (for some of us at least)

Clients

No, not talking about the people who hold to power to make or break our day, clients in reference to systems and APIs refers to the front facing website, mobile application, TV application, etc, that translates data from an application into an interact-able interface for the end users.

There are whole front-end roles dedicated to designing and building these interfaces. Whether it’s product or UX/UI design, to your standard HTML/CSS, JS languages for the web, and application specific languages as well for iOS, Android, Windows, and others.

For those who dabble or full on code WordPress themes, you’re probably already familiar with what’s stored in WordPress as an application vs. the code that organizes and displays the information properly. (front-end)

Take the_title() function…you should see this within every post or page template within WordPress, and it goes and gets the title of the individual page, post, or post type of the current or requested page. Notice the positioning, styling, and headers all fall outside of the imported data from the function. Also, what would show up if we used the tag outside of the loop or outside of WordPress? Nothing! Outside of our WordPress installation, it doesn’t know where to get the title, for what particular page or post, or how to format the title we receive.

APIs

When dealing with applications, this is where APIs come in real handy. When we have a client interface, we use an API to choose where to go get the data, what particular data we want, and how we want it formatted and imported.

Even going back to our theme example, we don’t ever see it, but when we use the the_title() function, it’s automatically picking the source, content, and format for the page/post title.

Or let’s say for Twitter, reading the latest tweet. Using Twitter’s API, we’d define the source: the Twitter application, what: the latest tweet from a specific user, and how we want the data included: syntax, meta information, etc. For some APIs, this works with posting too. So instead of just reading data, we’re going to send a call to write data once we’re in with the right authentication.

APIs are super useful and are widely used in almost any site or web application, whether you recognize it or not! APIs unlock potential for all kinds of data analysis, manipulation, remixing, and visualizations to name a few!

Weather API

Another quick example is weather data. Our client interface could be a website, or mobile app, and then using an API we can identify the source, specify where we want the weather reading, and how we want that information displayed.

WordPress as an Application

Now what could this possibly mean for my WordPress site? I was in the same boat about a year or so ago with all the technical talk surrounding the REST API and it’s integration into WordPress. One of the biggest breakthroughs is the introduction of the Headless CMS.

Headless CMS

Scary name, but it’s actually a really cool idea with lots of potential use cases. Currently to update WordPress, (unless using WP-CLI) you had to login to the WordPress Dashboard. (love it or hate it, it’s really the only option you got) Same way the the_title() function only works on your site within your WordPress loop, same went for editing, adding, or removing data within your installation.

But with this transition to WordPress as an application, WordPress itself is becoming independent from the dashboard and even your front facing website.

No, there’s no need to fear, your WordPress installation won’t break or get cut in half after automatically updating to the latest release. In fact, you probably won’t notice a difference at all, but within WordPress core, new outlets and possibilities to access and update data come with a lot of new functions.

So what?

No longer will we have to rely on XML or RSS to retrieve data from a WordPress site. (which is worth the update in of itself) But with the REST API, you can also update, add, and delete data as well…all outside of the native dashboard included. This presents the opportunities for custom dashboards! I’m sure many of us have found ways to hide settings or certain fields in the admin area for fear of a client accidentally nuking their whole site! With the Headless CMS possibility, you could even design and build a completely new front facing interface with only the fields the client absolutely needs to update! Even styling and tailoring it exactly to your company or client’s brand.

Two camps

I believe the transition to WordPress as an application will start to sort future opportunities into two camps. Which the two were outlined in a super good white paper from Human Made, and agency with many of the lead developers working on the WordPress REST API.

On one end, will be the developers. This includes both API developers, backend developers, and the frontend developers building the front facing interfaces we talked about earlier. Whether it be a website, mobile app, or even for other devices like TVs and sensors.

But before you start crying for those who are deathly afraid to touch code, the second camp might be much more interesting and exciting for the WordPress practitioner! While the new REST API integrations with WordPress are super exciting and unlock a whole ton of new capabilities for developers, the transitions going to attract brand new users to WordPress who don’t have a clue the difference between posts and custom posts, or what custom taxonomies bring to the table. And from a developer perspective, we’re honestly more focused on the code and API than the actual content itself.

So using WordPress as an application is going to require someone with a background in using WordPress to take a bunch of new data from a variety of sources, and organize and structure it within the contents of WordPress. (think custom post types, users, media library, etc)

And many of you are already doing that! At the meetup, we broke up into groups and brainstormed some really cool use cases to make it happen. From creating online invoicing platforms, warehouse training platforms, auto body shop app for customers…the possibilities and implementations are endless!

The best way to prepare for the full implementation of the WordPress REST API is to start viewing WordPress as an application. Anticipate where potential endpoints and data sources could be, and how you’d then organize it all within the open-source platform we love.

The WordPress Freelancer’s Tool Box

WordPress for Business, Meetup Meeting Notes, Deep Dive Discussions

Austin WordPress Deep Dive Discussion Meetup February 08, 2016

Sandi Batik and Nick Batik lead this month’s Austin WordPress Deep Dive Discussion focused on what it takes to build a successful freelance WordPress business. The WPATX organizers have had numerous requests to devote more meetups to the “Business” of WordPress. If this discussion topic proves popular, we will expand the topic into a more formal class for our WordPress Practitioners meetup, which is hosted in a larger venue.

Our attendees came prepared to talk about the tools and techniques they are currently using everyday in their WordPress businesses. We covered prospecting, marketing, proposal writing, client interviews / on-boarding, project management, client management, project close-out and invoicing client follow-up. It was a fast paced, interesting conversation about what was working and not working in our businesses.

To my mind the best part of the evening was the information exchange — each member introduced themselves, explained a little bit about their specific skill-set and their business. We were able to demonstrate that your next best resource or project partner might be sitting right next to you at the next Austin WordPress Meetup. Several folks exchanged cards and have the opportunity to work on jobs together. Helping each other succeed is the very ethos of our Austin WordPress Community, and it was great to see that culture of mutual support in action during the meeting.

At it’s core, the successful Freelance Business is about being helpful and supportive. Those ‘Solopreneurs’ who think in terms of collaborative partnership with their clients, and the other professions they team up with to delight that client are the pattern-card for a profitable, sustainable business.

Here is the link to our Deep Dive Discussion transcript and slide deck

Meetup Meeting Notes