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This week Matt Medeiros, Chris Badgett, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood and co-host Kim Shivler to discuss the latest WordPress news.   Episode 272’s sponsor is IntelligenceWP (intelligencewp.com). Are you ready to get more real user information from your Google Analytics data? Configure IntelligenceWP and start getting a better view of your site visitors.     The regulars welcomed special guest Matt Medeiros from The Matt Report (mattreport.com) for what turned out to be a lively WordPress discussion. Learn more about Matt at CraftedbyMatt.com   Stories included:    Freelance WordPress Development: How to Make a Career of It   https://wpshout.com/freelance-wordpress-developer/       WordPress Localization - 5 essentials to consider when translating your website https://www.collectiveray.com/wp/tutorials/wordpress-localization-translation     My Last Day at Moz. My First Day at SparkToro. https://sparktoro.com/blog/last-day-moz-first-day-sparktoro/     Bezos is coming: Mapping Amazon's growing reach https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bezos-is-coming-mapping-amazons-growing-reach   Aside from highlighting parts of these stories, the team spent quite a bit of time discussing WP-Engine’s significant price increase over the past week.   This led to an overall discussion of web hosting and the wars between different hosts. The quality difference between specialty WordPress hosting and lower priced shared hosting products. It was agreed that low-priced services (less than $30 a month) will only work for so long. As your business grows and website traffic grows, you need to budget for premium hosting that frequently costs $100 or more monthly.   Requirements for premium, managed, WordPress hosting are particularly important for large ecommerce stores, membership sites, and learning management platforms.

We Interview Jason Rodriguez of Litmus who recently published a great article about AMP for Email . We discuss why Google is pushing this technology so strongly. Then we go on to talking about Jason roll with Litmus connected to him building a real community inside a powerful forum that has thousands of users. We also discuss the future of email and the latest best practices connected to using email to build your online business. https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/271-wp-tonic-show-special-guest-jason-rodriguez-litmus https://www.rodriguezcommaj.com https://litmus.com

This week on the WP-Tonic Roundtable show, John Locke, Chris Badgett and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 270. The covered several articles covering online topics from pondering if websites are dead to evaluating tips for making your website faster. This show’s sponsor is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) as WordPress plugin designed to give you more insight into your Google Analytics statistics. Story 1 The sudden death of the website https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/the-sudden-death-of-the-website/ The author of this story proposes that websites are quickly moving to become a thing of the past and predicts that the first major brand will shut down its website in 2018. The team pointed out that while online marketing is growing and changing, they don’t see the death of websites as imminent. They agreed that conversational marketing, having real conversations with your customers which the author touts, is a powerful marketing/sales tool and it will continue to grow, however, that doesn’t mean that websites are dead. As Chris pointed out, even if you have an online business and are doing sales online, learning the basics of classic sales techniques can serve you well. Story 2 On AMP for Email https://www.rodriguezcommaj.com/blog/on-amp-for-email The team sees many members in the web community who are skeptical of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and distrusting Google’s intentions. The author brings those concerns to the email aspects of AMP as opposed to the mobile web page structure the team has discussed before. Story 3 - How to Show Your Web Design Clients You Care about Their ROI https://calderaforms.com/2018/02/show-web-design-clients-care-roi/ Everyone agreed that the ROI (Return on Investment) of their website is what’s important to customers. Sometimes in development, there is a lot of focus on tools, but remember the tools are a means to an end. Customers are paying you to get them that ROI. In this article, Caldera is defining ROI as getting qualified leads. That’s what the client cares about not that the site wins design awards. Positioning yourself as a developer or agency who cares about a customers return, understands the need for conversions, and helps customers understand this ROI using Google Analytics may be used as a competitive advantage. Story 4 Reconsider Blogging on Medium if You’re Worried about SEO One of the author’s main concerns was that Medium uses no follow links. Generally with SEO, you want to have follow links as opposed to no follow links. The team viewed this differently. While follow links are desired for page rank, they see Medium as another channel for building your brand like YouTube and another place to find potential customers. This goes beyond the specific value of Google Page Rankings. It’s about finding new readers and gaining traffic. If someone finds you on Medium, clicks through to your site, joins your mailing list, and maybe becomes a customer, there is value in that link. Story 5 - Historical yearly trends in the usage of content management systems for websites https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y For many who are part of the web development community, this report might be startling. While most in the WordPress community know that WordPress powers over 29% of the Internet, they may not realize that over 50% of websites are still not using any CMS (Content Management System). The team agreed that based on these numbers that Content Management Systems are still not part of the mainstream. One thing they found interesting was that Wix only powers approximately .5% of websites. Based on the YouTube advertising by some of their proponents you would think they held a larger piece of the pie. The main takeaway was that there is still room for a lot of growth and many changes. Story 6 - 13 Performance-Boosting Site Speed Tips for WordPress https://torquemag.io/2018/02/13-performance-boosting-site-speed-tips-wordpress/ While the team has covered this in the past, Jonathan pointed out that it’s always a topic of interest with his clients. It was felt that the article had some good information, and they added two other big points that they find important. While the article mentioned selecting responsive themes, the team covered the importance of well written themes that load fast. A favorite of both Chris and Adam is the Astra theme (https://wordpress.org/themes/astra/). They also agreed that selecting the proper web host is critical. Slow servers at the web host along with outdated PHP and other server configurations can negatively impact your site performance. Kinsta hosting is a web host that focuses on performance and security for WordPress websites. They are also the sponsors of the WP-Tonic Wednesday show, and the WP-Tonic website runs on Kinsta hosting.

We Discuss LearnIing In a New Century With Jeff Cobb Jeff has commercially published two books – Leading the Learning Revolution and Shift Ed – and self-published a third – 10 Ways to Be a Better Learner. he has blogged for more than a decade on multiple sites, including Mission to Learn, Tagoras, and Learning Revolution. You can find more here: https://www.learningrevolution.net/ http://www.jeffthomascobb.com/

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have an round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies and discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress related articles/stories of the week. You can watch the show live every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

Miranda Lievers is co-founder & COO of Thinkific, a tech company enabling tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and companies to create, market, and sell their own courses online. She jumped ship from her fast-track corporate job and into full-time entrepreneurship a decade ago, earning her MBA along the way. These days she’s devoted to growing Thinkific while working to help business owners around the globe build their own successful companies online. https://www.thinkific.com/

This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Featured stories included the latest update of WordPress 4.9.4 released to fix the auto update feature that was broken in 4.9.3, a proposal to stop configuring WordCamps in a track format to allow more interaction of diverse users, Five reasons people redesign their websites, 2017 in review by Delicious Brains, and a public service announcement explaining Google’s latest declaration that all sites need to be using an SSL certificate by summer 2018. More Detailed Notes This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Article 1 covered the almost immediate release of WordPress 4.9.4 right after 4.9.3 because the recent release of 4.9.3 broke the auto update option. https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-4-fixes-critical-auto-update-bug-in-4-9-3 All software has bugs. Not sure if it was because they were pressed for time. The key is that sometimes as you roll it out something else breaks. It’s a testing issue and testing can always get better. Story 2 was about ditching WordCamp tracks. This author proposes stopping the practice of having multiple tracks at WordCamps in order to make it easier for attendees to get the information you need. https://mrwweb.com/wordcamp-tracks-itineraries/ Story 3 covers the Top 5 Reasons for Website Redesign. This one was written by our own roundtable member John Locke. https://www.lockedownseo.com/5-signs-website-redesign-project/ As a web developer, these are the 5 Top Reason he has seen for people redesigning their site. 1) They want more business. 2) Their website looks outdated. 3) People like their target customers or team aren’t using the site. 4) They have features they have been waiting to add and have been waiting on it. 5) No one has updated the site because it’s too hard to use. They pointed out it is actually a mixture of those, and that increasing revenue is almost always part of it. Story 4 covered a Delicious Brains review of 2017 including their Hiring, Firing and Revenue Details. https://deliciousbrains.com/2017-year-in-review/ Similar to our earlier covering of Pippin Williams 2017 review, the team discussed the overall popularity of providing annual reviews along with the discussion on the company’s specific 2017 experience. Story 5 Google said you have to have an SSL Certificate by the summer. Insecure website shows in Chrome. The team also pointed out that when it’s a WordPress website, you must make sure that you do it properly or you can break your site.

Chris Coyier  joined host Jonathan Denwood and guest co-host John Locke for episode 265 of the WP-Tonic Podcast. Chris is the founder of CSS-Tricks (https://css-tricks.com/) and joint founder of CodePen (https://codepen.io/). This week’s sponsor is Kinsta Hosting (https://kinsta.com/?kaid=QTZIMOYOCEZL). Kinsta hosting is the official web host of the WP-Tonic website. This episode covered information about CodePen, CSS-Tricks and delved into Chris’s ideas about online training and learning. Chris explained the heart of CodePen is a code editor in the browser. You can write CSS, HTML, and Javascript and see it live in the browser. You can then hit save and get a URL of what you just did. It’s very helpful for teaching code. CSS-Tricks is a blog site for developers that consists of many tutorials. Jonathan speaks of CSS-Tricks as part of the online training arena popular right now and asked Chris where he sees online training. Online training isn’t fully baked yet. Chris sees many options coming in the future for online training and sees opportunities arising. He particularly spoke to this in terms of technical training and development. He also sees CSS-Tricks as a tutorial site but not an official online learning site, because there is no learning path.

Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 264 of WP-Tonic. This episode is brought to you by IntelligenceWP, a WordPress plugin that integrates with Google Analytics to give you more insight into your site’s traffic and user engagement. https://intelligencewp.com/ This week’s roundtable covered several hot stories for the WordPress community. Chris Badgett announced a new update for LifterLMS. They just released an advanced quiz option that includes features like fill in the blank, short and long answer, having students upload assignments, and reordering items in a list. https://lifterlms.com/product/advanced-quizzes/ The first story news was a big one. iThemes has joined the Liquid Web family. https://ithemes.com/2018/01/31/ithemes-joining-the-liquid-web-family/ The group wasn’t surprised. It was pointed out that the iThemes sync was already part of the Liquid Web platform, and that hosting companies are often purchasing products that enhance their offerings. Along the lines of companies purchasing products that fit their ecosystem, the second story covered UpdraftPlus purchasing Easy Updates Manager a plugin to help manage hosting. The team agreed that this makes sense in their backup ecosystem. https://wptavern.com/updraftplus-acquires-easy-updates-manager-plugin Story 3 wishes a Happy Birthday to WordPress - as WordPress turns 15. , along with congratulations, Jonathan floated out the possibility that a major fork may take place. Sallie said while there may be gossip, forking WP would be a huge undertaking. Talk is easy, but doing it is a very large undertaking. You would really need a specific vision. Forking WordPress to keep it the same isn’t a good enough vision. She is seeing more encouraging information about Gutenberg. Chris said the surest way to see the future is to create it. He points to leadership and doesn’t hear a clear leadership voice in the ecosystem. Certainly not a voice that shows we have a clear vision to make splitting the path something viable. John Locke discussed that while people talk about forking, he agrees with Sallie and Chris. It is a major undertaking. Story 4 - WooCommerce 3.3 pulled from WP Repository because it broke themes https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-3-3-removed-from-plugin-directory-due-to-theme-conflicts John Locke who has several WooCommerce customers had a few issues on updates but was surprised that it was pulled from the repository. He did mention how hard it is to create software with so many moving parts. Sallie pointed out the irony that this is the WooCommerce version that was to work with all themes, yet it was theme issues that caused the removal. She did note that the issues she had in themes were not catastrophic but were noticeable. Her biggest challenge has been that purchasing from WooCommerce.com has become confusing to her clients. You have to sign in with your WordPress.com account - but clients don’t know what it is. Never make it hard for people to give you money. Chris spoke of using WooCommerce on their LifterLMS site. They sell LifterLMS software with WooCommerce. They love open source because they optimize the way it does license keys, etc. In the spirit of our earlier conversation about and leadership and vision, Chris asked, What is the vision for WooCommerce? We need a map of where it’s going especially if you aren’t a power user. If setting up your first store, it may make you look to a Shopify or something else. Sallie brought a story forth about Ebay switching payment processors. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-31/ebay-to-ditch-paypal-for-dutch-processor-adyen-lowering-costs?ref=webdesignernews.com The news pundits mentioned PayPal stock falling, but the team doesn’t think this means it means a whole lot to PayPal or to eBay’s customers. The discussed options for payment processing on WordPress sites including Stripe. This final discussion reminds us that there are things outside of WordPress, like payment processors, that affect WordPress users.

We Interview Lee Jackson founder of Agency Trail Blazer Community podcast and membership website is on a mission to help design & web agencies fall in love with their business again. This show is dedicated to exploring ways we can improve agency life, grow our businesses, achieve our goals and get back time with our loved ones. https://agencytrailblazer.com/