Wp Builds

WP Builds Newsletter #3 - Covering The Week Commencing 5th March 2018

In this episode of the WP Builds podcast we chat to Pia Silva from badassyourbrand.com. She's a New Yorker with a whole load of energy and is a lady on a mission to "Bad Ass Your Brand". It's the title of her book as well as her philosophy to create a brand for your company. It's definitely not about just growing your agency; more staff, more contracts more... everything. It's about cutting things out of your business and making it very specifically the place that you want to work. It's about trying to do less work, to get paid more and have a little more time off.

WP Builds Newsletter #2 - Week Commencing 26th February 2018

This week we chat to the man who in the world of WordPress needs no introduction... Troy Dean. He's become an important figure in our community and is a great podcast guest who has a lot of great advice. Of course, you'll know about Troy from his very successful projects such as WP Elevation and Rock Star Empires. His courses have inspired many people (me included) to really take a long look at their WordPress businesses and think about how they could become more profitable. He's a great speaker, with that rare ability to speak at great length and be authoritative at the same time.

WP Builds Newsletter #1 - Week Commencing 19th February 2018

In this episode we are joined for the second time by Mike Killen who runs Sell Your Service. Last time he was on the WP Builds podcast, he talked about how to create funnels to assist you with your marketing goals. He made the process seem to simple! Well, I think that his experience on the podcast went to his head, because soon after we'd ended the call we started to talk about his new idea - Beaver Funnels. This is his game changing plugin that allows you to leverage the awesomeness of the Beaver Builder Page Builder and use it to create point and click funnels.

So many of you are now using a Page Builder, admit it! Honestly, why wouldn't you, they are such a great way to cut hours of time out of the development process of your WordPress web site. Well, I'm sure that you've heard of Beaver Builder, one of the Page Builders that you really ought to be using. I could go into all the reasons, but suffice to say that it's polished, reliable, and as stable as a thing which holds horses! Recently the guys over at Beaver Builder released version 2.0 into the wild and Robby McCullough is here to explain all about it.

Let's be clear, this is a great story about something that we'd all like to happen to us! So you're a developer and you come up with an idea that you decide you should build. You really don't think about whether or not there is a target market and how many potential customers you're going to have, you just build it because you have the ability to do it. Then, one day, more or less by chance you meet a bunch of people who just happen to know other people who have the ability to make your product a success for you. It's the stuff of dreams.

It seems that Eric is one of those people who is always creating new things. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, I really do mean that every couple of months he's trying his hand at something new! Lucky for us, Eric is really rather good at actually delivering new things that are well made and useful, and Instant IDE is no exception. It's new, but is already a pretty robust product, with autocomplete, tree style directory navigation, colour preferences, in fact pretty much all you could want.

Since the dawn of the internet, it was pretty obvious that if you wanted to do anything other than look at "stuff that other people had put there", you were going to need forms. You can submit things to a web site and they can then parse that data, do fun things to it and then present it to you in a different way. So now there are forms everywhere! Mark Sinclair explains why SparkChart is a powerhouse survey tool for you and your clients.

The Elementor folk are thinking about the future and how the product is going to evolve over the coming year. The obvious question is how Elementor is going to align with Gutenberg which is now only a few months away. Are Gutenberg and Elementor in opposition or are they going to work in harmony together? What are the plans to introduce an Elementor Theme Builder, and will it be a new product, or an upgrade to the Pro version of the current product? Also, what’s going on in the longer term?

Well, this is going to be a nice treat for all of you folk that like a Page Builder, especially if that Page builder is called Elementor! Elementor has been growing in popularity during 2017 and has established itself as a solid platform with a reputation for being easy to use with a very generous free version. Ben joins us in Part 1 to tell us about how Elementor got to be where it is today. Who worked on it, how did they decide what to include and what to leave out. Well worth a listen.

In this episode we get to meet Bradley Kirby who has a very cool little plugin for Beaver Builder called Wallace Inline. It's really rather cool, and allows you to update the contents of your Beaver Builder pages without actually using the Beaver Builder dialogue boxes. If you've never used Beaver Builder then you need to know that when you edit content on your page, a little box opens up with all the settings for that 'module'. This plugin changes that and makes editing even more easy!

Last week we introduced you to Regina Tuzzolino and her remarkable approach to writing copy. Well, in this, the second part of the interview, Regina unpacks the ways that this method can be applied to web site copy. It’s such an innovative way to tackle what many of us don’t really like doing. Not only do we not have the required skills, but we’re often more focussed upon the way that a site looks and less upon the impact of the language that we use.

So web copy is hard to do. Some of you might be experts, but most of us are not! We struggle to find a way to make copy that is engaging and innovative; something that people will want to read. Regina has a wonderful take on how to create successful copy through her step-by-step process. It's called the 'Hero's Journey', a 12 step method of breaking down ideas into something meaningful which will resonate well with people.

In the episode we talk to Edmund Turbin about WP Engine and why you might consider it if you're in the game for a hosting provider. I'm sure that you've heard of WP Engine before, but if you haven't, they're a WordPress specific host who do WordPress and nothing else. They have been experiencing amazing growth since they were founded, and it says a lot about the WordPress ecosystem that services such as this can thrive.

Discussion - David and Nathan discuss whether or not it's a good idea to automatically update your plugins. Interview - How to get paid more with Brent Weaver - Part 2. Last week we were introduced to Brent Weaver from uGurus. We learned about his business and how he aims to assist businesses achieve higher fees and become more profitable. This week is a little different, because we're delving more into Brent (the man) and not Brent (the business man)! Does that make sense?

In this episode of the podcast we talk to Brent Weaver from uGurus. He's an exceptionally thoughtful mentor for people who would like to see an upturn in their web design business. uGurus has been going for many years and has helped loads of agencies both big and small to increase their fees. I guess that there is no magic sauce for this kind of thing, but what you'll be gaining is the combined experience of people who have struggled through this problem before.

In this episode we talk a lot at the beginning about the fact that we're going to be making some changes to the podcast over the coming weeks. We also talk about what processes we follow when we work. In the light of all the tools that we have available to us these days, what we do / use to get a site from proposal to completion. Now, we're not saying that you should follow what we do, as we know that it's likely hopeless, but we're telling you anyway so that you can tear us down and make us feel inadequate!

This week we chat to Chris Mason, the founder of a few plugins which extend WooCommerce. Making sales on the internet can be hard, and it’s made more difficult if the checkout process is not optimised as much as possible. If you run a WooCommerce store then you’ll know that the checkout process, whilst perfectly okay, doesn't really allow you to upsell items. Well, WooCurve aims to make that a reality.