How to Better Serve the WordPress Community and You

Over the past couple of years, I focused on teaching and helping individual professional developers who want to master and continually level up. But it occurs to me that not everyone is or can be a professional developer. That revelation opened my eyes to how limited my mission is. I want to help the WordPress solution provider community to improve the quality, make more money, and create a competitive advantage for yourselves. My focus is too narrow. Therefore, I’m expanding my mission initiatives to better serve you.

As I discussed in my previous article, many are struggling to make a full-time, sustainable income in this market. How can we fix this? Let’s have another open and honest discussion.

Websites need code. They are hungry for it. Code drives everything on the internet and in our digital world.

The simple fact is (brace yourself): code is expensive. It is.

The simple fact is: code is expensive.Over its entire lifecycle, the process of building, testing, and maintaining code takes a specific set of proficiencies and time. It’s costly, especially if the code has quality issues. Bugs and wonky behavior suck away the profits, eating at your time and resources. They also drive your clients crazy. Spending too much time building code drives your costs up. It’s another profit sucker. Every single hour you put into the project keeps ticking away on the project’s cost meter. All that time trying to figure out how to do something, researching, asking questions of others, searching for code snippets, patching side effects, and dealing with issues costs you money.

Programming is not hard. It’s not. But building quality, cost-effective products is hard. Learning programmatic thought and problem solving is not hard either. But it takes you dedicating yourself to the process and finding a quality teacher. Once you learn these, then you can master programming and wow the world with your awesome stuff.Building quality, cost-effective code is hard.

If we stop and look at the demographics of our community, how many folks are proficient professional developers? How many are capable of building anything by themselves? How many can build quality, from-scratch, custom solutions? How many are able to do it full-time and make a profit to live the life they want?

My initiatives need to expand for the demand.

My Initiatives to Help You

There is a great demand for code and innovation. There are those who can or want to build it. Then there are those who need it as part of their overall solutions and strategies. These are two different use cases and segments of the market. I want to turn on all the light bulbs and help all of us do more.

I’m expanding my initiatives for you to focus on these two separate areas:

• Teaching
• Building the code for you (just gimme the code)

Teaching Initiative

I love teaching. The idea of sharing a vision and then watching you make it your own is rewarding. Empowering you to do more and innovate drives me. Then I really dig teaching you the secrets of quality, proficiency, and efficiency.

Teaching is a calling in my life. I will continue doing it.

Know the Code

For those who can or want to build software solutions, the profession demands much from you.It requires continuous, incremental learning throughout your entire career. I’m not excluded from that fact. All of us have to dedicate ourselves to continuously leveling up.

For you, I teach at Know the Code.

Know the Business

Running your business is much more than just writing code. You likely started freelancing or opened your agency without having business experience.Teaching you the business side of development.. Yup, that’s common. It can be overwhelming to deal with business needs.

While you might be a wiz at putting together code solutions together, you might be struggling with business strategies such as:

• Client acquisition and retainment
• Project scoping
• Change management
• Lifecycle management
• and more

All of these things contribute to your profitability and quality of life.Thank you to Brian Gardner for the name: Know the Business. Seriously. Business stress weighs on you.

To help you, I’m expanding my teaching to include business at Know the Business. I’ll be teaching you those business and project skills.

Books & Blog

I love writing. There’s something delightful in transforming ideas into words and painting a picture to convey the message.

I share ideas here on my blog.

But I also write books. These are meant to connect a cable from my head to yours. They let me share master tips and insights while giving your valuable, practical knowledge you can use right now. My books are available on LeanPub.

Just Gimme the Code Initiative

I get requests almost everyday for code. People need it. I spend a lot of time helping folks tweak this or add that. I watch them struggle and I want to help. And then there are the designers, implementers, and content strategists who need the code too.Imagine clicking “Build” and then you have a branded, custom, complete website …in minutes.

I’m expanding my initiatives to provide you with the code.

How? How could I possibly have time to teach and write custom, specific code just for you? Ah, you’re thinking too narrow.

Come with me on a visual journey. Ready? Now I can’t give you all the details of it without giving away all the secrets. But I can give you a general concept.

Bold Innovation

I want you to imagine a workspace which empowers you to visually build custom, beautifully unique web and user experiences. It’s your workspace. It’s a magical place where you visually an entire website. The visual libraries give you the means to select templates and elements. Everything is fully customized to your specifications. The libraries are shown to you per your branding needs.ImpressUX empowers you to visually create custom, beautifully unique web and user experiences.

You drop, drag, and customize. Click the button and view your visual creation on different devices including phones, tablets, laptops, and even the huge desktop screens. It’s a true WYSIWYG platform.

Collaborate with your team and client. Then when it’s ready, demo it for your client’s approval. Make live adjustments and show them what they will get.

Are you getting goosebumps? You should.

The workspace is intelligent too. It provides you with best practices, statistics, and helps you to maximize the experience for your client. You can do as much or little customization as you want without ever touching the code. It’s all at your fingertips.

What kind of site do you want to build? It’s intelligent and walks you through the process of pre-configuring a site for you. Portfolio, e-commerce, membership, photography, blog, wedding, and any other site you can imagine. Its libraries are filled with the stuff you need to successfully build what your project needs.

Now imagine a big “Build” button. When you click that button, imagine a bunch of developer elves running around in the server building your custom code. Magically, automatically, and within minutes, the platform builds and delivers all the code you need.

We magically build your custom code in minutes, support it, and maintain it for you.Did you get goosebumps? You should have. I know I do whenever I think about what I want to build for you.

Let me go one step further. Imagine that my team and I build the code for you (in minutes mind you) and then we support and maintain it. When WordPress or some plugin has a new update, we push update notifications and handle the process of updating your client’s code. If we find an issue, we handle the process.

Now you should definitely have goosebumps.

If you are a developer, this concept should thrill you. Why? Because it allows you to focus on the unique business logic (you know the fun stuff). If you are not a developer, you can get a complete, custom beautifully unique web and user experience.

You create, collaborate, and demo. We build and maintain the codebase for you, including the plugins, theme, setup, and even dummy content.

Imagine how this platform will drive your costs down over the entire lifecycle of your client’s website. Imagine how fast you can deliver a complete solution for your projects. Get paid faster.

Our bold innovative initiative is called ImpressUX.

How to Build It

A bold initiative requires a tremendous amount of time to bring it from an idea to reality. How are we going to build it? How we going to fund the build? We are doing sweat equity and bootstrapping the beginning phases.

Jackie D’Elia suggested launching a smaller scale product to generate revenue and help our community. That’s a good idea. Let’s do that.

Okay, now what do we build? What is needed for all us to build products and websites? And who in the WordPress market knows us best? The Genesis community. Aha, let’s build GenesisFactory. And why we’re at it, we really need some dummy content that can be configurable and automatic just for WordPress. Cool, let’s build DummyContent

GenesisFactory

Do you build Genesis-powered sites? Genesis is the developer’s theming framework as it makes it incredibly easy for you to spin up a new website.

The custom Genesis code you want…in minutesImagine going to a site that is specifically for Genesis and getting the code you need. Imagine configuring what you want and then, bam, the site builds it for you. You can build a site in minutes and not days or weeks.

Meet GenesisFactory.

The first phase will be similar to GenerateWP conceptually. You will be able to configure different areas and then take the code to your project.

The next phase is where the magic happens. Click the “Build” button and our magical server elves will get to work building your custom Genesis-powered code.

Phase one is coming November 1. Make sure you are following the project on Twitter to stay in the know.

DummyContent

We all need dummy content. We can use some Lorem Ipsum generators which give you a few paragraphs.The WordPress dummy content the way you want it…in minutes. Then you copy and paste it in for each piece of content. That’s slow, arduous, and time consuming. Translation, that’s costing you money.

DummyContent solves these problems for you. You configure the content you want. You specify the post types (post, page, or custom post type), taxonomies, title and content lengths (varying and random), amount of content, attributes, images, and more.

Then you push the magic “Build” button. The site generates the WordPress XML file for you in minutes. You then import that file into your site. In minutes you have a site full of dummy content.

That saves you time and money. It gives you demo content for your product(s) and for your clients.

Coming Q4 2016. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

Wrap It Up

Did I blow your mind? I hope so. I hope you have goosebumps and want this now. I hope what I’m doing will empower you to make more money and achieve all that you want in this life. I want so much for you. I’m thinking big and bold to help you be more awesome.

Don’t be shy. Let me know what you think in the comments below or in social media. If you think I’m nuts, it’s cool to say so. If you dig it, let me know. I want to know if I’m on the right track for you. Do you want training and/or code? Reach out.

I’m wishing you a happy and productive day. Cheers. <happy coding>