 Welcome to the afternoon track, resources and lessons for using WordPress in your business. And that's what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be sharing, basically let's just be straight up, okay? I'm going to be sharing with you a bunch of websites and links. That's it. Well, also some lessons I've learned along the way. So what I do in my time is I build WordPress themes and plugins for clients. Most of the time it's from the ground up. Themes I build with, you know, a simple starter theme or something like that, a starter boilerplate and plugins I build custom for clients. I also fix problems for people. People come to me with problems and we'll look at what's going on and we'll repair it for them. I also really like to figure things out. So if someone comes to me with an idea or something they'd like to accomplish with their business, I can help figure out what they can, how to accomplish that goal using WordPress. So what about you? Who here runs their business on WordPress? Who has a WordPress hire so I can see you? Okay, cool. There's some people in the crowd. That's good. Who has a custom WordPress theme for their business? Couple hands. What about a free theme? Anyone using a free theme at all? Couple hands. Okay. What about a child theme of either a free theme or a premium theme? We've got two or three hands. Okay. Well, choosing a WordPress theme is hard. To complicate the matter, there's premium themes, free themes, child themes. It just really gets confusing if you're a business owner and you want to use WordPress and you really want to have a look and feel that you like and there's just thousands of themes out there. So what are you going to do? Really you have four options. You can install a free theme, buy a premium theme, modify a theme with a child theme, or you can build a custom theme. So free or premium themes. So there's just thousands of these and knowing where to find the right one is difficult. You know, I would say if you're getting started in your business, getting your site up and running is super important because your information is going to be out there. Don't spend so much time mulling over the right theme. Find a solid one, put it up, and start kind of gathering data. Like put some analytics on your site, see how people are engaging, put your content up, and then use that as a prototype to figure out how you can move to the next level and how you can get the theme that you really want. I've seen too many people get a theme and spend so much time in the very beginning trying to make it perfect and then as their business starts to grow and develop, they start realizing where their most important content is and how they have to restructure things and then by that point they're building a new theme. So child themes are simply a way to modify a theme. So if you have a premium theme or a free theme, you'll use this to change the layout a little bit. Maybe you want to change the colors, maybe you want to replace the logo with yours. Child themes is the way to do it and you really don't want to go too crazy with child themes. And what I mean by that is you don't want to customize it to the point where it's completely unrecognizable, where you're trying to do something different. I've seen this happen a lot and I've seen people spend tons of money on child themes. So much money that they could have created a custom theme. So a custom theme is from the ground up, right? You maybe hire a designer, a developer, maybe an agency and they're going to build a custom theme for you. And typically kind of a traditional approach is you have a PSD and you go through a vision process and then it all gets approved and then it goes to the developer and it goes into development and they build this theme based off of that design. So going back to what I said previously about using another theme to kind of prototype how things are laid out for your business, it's going to really help figure out how to build a custom site for your business. Maybe your users were going to this one specific page about some product and it ended up being like that's the most important thing and that's where most of your users were going. So you want to highlight that. Use that data as a resource to build something custom that's going to really have a good impact. So where do you find good themes? Premium or free, that is the hard part. So I have a couple rules here. Be wary of themes that promise everything. There's a lot of page builders, custom short codes, sliders, content types being built into themes. And so the big downfall of this may look really pretty. I mean you're woozed by that demo, right? You click on that demo and there's like all this cool parallax stuff and you're like, man, I want that for my business. I'm really going to get those clients. It's going to be awesome. Well, what you're going to be doing is putting yourself in technical debt. So switching your theme after that, let's say you go with that theme and then several months go by, right? Maybe six months or whatever and you start seeing some issues or things that you want to change. Getting that data out of that theme is going to require a lot of work and it's going to cost you some money because someone's going to have to figure out where that data is and they're going to have to pull it out of there and put it into either a plugin or into your new theme and that's a lot of work. So be very wary of themes that try to sell you everything. So if you're on a marketplace, you'll see this kind of thing. Just be very careful. Don't dive in immediately. So this is a great theme shop. I only have a few recommendations here for theme shops. I'm not going to go crazy with tons and tons of places because I really only have a few that I trust and array themes is one of them. They're super solid and they follow the WordPress coding standards. That's another thing. A lot of these themes don't follow any standard at all and they're just kind of building stuff to wooze you to buy it. I'm going to hold off on questions for now. Array themes. Oh, I'm sorry. Also, I'm going to be sharing all of this at the very end. I have a link that will take you to a post that I created with all this stuff. So don't worry. If I go too fast, it'll all be available to you. Another one is the theme foundry. These guys have been putting out solid work for a long time. If a client came to me and they had a certain budget and they didn't have a budget for a custom build, I would probably recommend theme foundry or array themes and say, hey, these guys make really solid stuff. Let's see what we can do. Maybe we can make a child theme with it. And then when you're ready, if you need a custom theme down the road, we can do it. This is a really cool resource I found. It's theme friendly. And they have this theme finder, which I found pretty interesting because it rates themes based on WordPress best practices. So you're getting these 10 out of 10s and 9.7 out of whether they follow WordPress coding standards. If they pass certain checks that the theme review team at WordPress, it's kind of this review process that they go through to submit themes to the repository. So this is a really cool thing. And you can filter these themes down based on different types like blog or business portfolio. There's features too. So really cool resource. This is another pretty cool resource that I have yet to use. But these are two people who used to work for the WordPress theme review team and they created this service. So let's say like you buy a premium theme. Maybe it's even an array theme. Maybe it's a theme boundary theme or maybe it's just from somewhere else. But you really want to know if you're making a good investment. And that investment on a premium theme could be like $42 maybe. But you're like, wow, I'm going to put all of my ducks into this row. I don't know. So anyway, you can submit the theme for review. And these guys will give a thorough review on, you know, if the theme is following standards, where it can be improved, that sort of thing. And they would probably be really straight up with you on whether or not you should use it for your business. So this is a very valuable resource. So maybe even you have a custom theme that you hired someone like me to build and you're like, is this guy for real? Like, come on, tell me what's up. These guys will probably give you the straight dope on that. So StudioPress is another one. I'm sure maybe you are familiar with the Genesis platform. I personally have never used it, although I have had lots of people tell me that it's super solid and it's a trustworthy source. So that's why I have it up here. I've never heard of any griping and complaining from across the WordPress community about StudioPress. So again, there is a solid source. And there's just so many themes available to peruse through. Things to keep in mind. Many agencies and designers use premium themes for their clients. So if you have a business and you're going to an agency and you're like, I want you to build me a theme. A lot of times they're using premium themes and they're building child themes. Sometimes they're using premium themes and they're modifying them directly, which doesn't happen. I haven't seen that happen in a long time, but be very careful. So if they are using a premium theme for you, be sure to ask what theme it is. And hopefully they're very open and honest about it and they'll tell you. And there's licensing involved with that usually. So make sure to ask about licenses and updates for these themes because if you have access to that license, you can make sure it doesn't expire. And hopefully if they have access to the license, maybe they have some kind of developer license or agency license which allows them to have yearly updates for this theme and they just give it to you. If you build a custom theme, if you hire someone to build a custom theme, ask about updates and ask about maintenance. Unlike a lot of these other themes which push out updates all across the board to everybody who has their theme installed, custom themes are unique to you. And they're going to require, like everything, everything requires maintenance. There could be some kind of function inside there that could be deprecated or go away. And with time, a lot of those things need to be looked at to make sure that it's keeping up to date with WordPress as WordPress moves forward. So a lot of these themes, the premium ones that you're really excited about that have all these features, they come with page builders. But let's talk about page builder plugins because there's plugins which will do this and not be coupled to the theme. That way, if you switch themes, you can take that page builder layout with you. There's this one called Velocity Page. It's kind of like a front-end editor. You can create columns, you can move around block quotes, move around images. A lot of times I have clients get really frustrated with the content editor. Who's been frustrated with the content editor in formatting? Anyone? I have. It can be really frustrating. These types of things will help save your day. And this Velocity Page is a paid plugin, so you're going to have to fork out a license for it. I didn't put it on here, but I think it's like $99. Does anyone know? No? Another one is Conductor Plugin. So a similar thing, a page layout builder that you can use with any theme. There are specific themes that can come coupled with these. Basically, the theme has been designed in a way that will work well with these plugins. This is another paid product. Another popular one is Beaver Builder. It's kind of like a drag-and-drop editor for your front-end editor. So using these instead of going to those themes that promise these big page builders is probably going to save you a huge headache. So let's talk about plugins for a minute. Just like themes, finding the right plugin can be an exhaustive process. You're going to the plugin repository and you're looking for the right thing, so you download it and you test it, and it almost does what you want, but it doesn't quite do what you want. So you go back and you find another one and you look at it and you're going through this process and it's really difficult. There's hundreds, if not thousands of premium and paid plugins, so same scenario. And I would suggest you don't go and just haphazardly download plugins and use them. At times that could be beneficial to you, but sometimes when you press Activate on that plugin, you'll get errors on your page because there's some plugins that haven't been updated in a long time and they're throwing errors in their code. So here's some general guidelines. This is by no means like any kind of standard or anything. Sometimes this is just what I tell people. Read through the plugin documentation before assuming it does what you want. So look and see, there's screenshots there. See if it's really doing what you wanted to do. Another thing is ratings can be very deceiving. So if there's a one-star review for a plugin, and the person is in there saying, it doesn't work, you really got to figure out why it didn't work for them. Maybe it just didn't do what they wanted it to do and they got upset and rated it one star. You could also have a really well rated plugin that has been updated two years ago, the last time. So look and see when the plugin was last updated. This is super important. You want to see a plugin that's in active development and is being constantly supported by the developer because they're going to be fixing security issues and vulnerabilities that could have a big impact on your site. And this is another one that I think really helps out. Is there a premium version of the plugin? Now why is that important? I think it's important because if there is a premium version, perhaps the person is getting financially supported for paying attention to that plugin for putting effort into it, for putting work into it. People don't understand a lot of times the amount of work that goes into building a plugin. So if it's supported, if they're getting paid, they're going to be happy. So donating to the plugin or a paid version of the plugin might mean that they're really excited about supporting that product. So that's just one thing to look out for. It's not necessarily like every plugin needs that to be good. That is not at all what I'm necessarily saying. I'm saying it could be a positive sign that it could work for you. Here is another resource. This is the Tidy repo. So this is a place where someone has a couple of people have gone in and reviewed tons of plugins, kind of put them through a little bit of a gauntlet, if you will. And checked them out, reviewed them, wrote a thorough review and links to the download. There's paid plugins. There's premium plugins that they review. Super great resource. But here's another service that they offer. They will find a plugin for you. It's a service. So you can pay $35 and they can help you find a plugin. So right here it says sort through the chaos. That's what they're doing for you. If you're downloading plugins for your business, this is super important. This is your business website. It's not a joke. So take it seriously. And put in the extra dollars it takes to search for the right functionality for you. It requires a lot of research and effort. Super great resource. So let's talk about hosting just briefly. And I'm not going to go into this too much, but finding the right hosting for your site is super important. Does everyone know what managed WordPress hosting is? Yes, no. So managed WordPress hosting is usually what I suggest to my clients. It's not necessary. It definitely depends on your level of engagement. It's kind of like a concierge service for your hosting, for WordPress. Because they're going to be handling your backups, a lot of your updates. And they're going to be kind of like hand holding you through the hosting process. You may not need it if you kind of do that thing yourself or you're using another service. But it can be super helpful. So I'm just going to share a couple of the ones that I recommend. WP Engine. They're kind of like the, I would say like a flagship of WordPress managed hosting. They're kind of one of the first people to show up on the scene doing it. My site's on it. It's great. Their service is awesome. Their plans kind of, I think they started around $29 or something like that for their basic package. So managed WordPress hosting is a little more expensive than just your general shared hosting. But it's super worth it. Yeah, share. Well, managed, a lot of managed WordPress hosting are kind of like on a shared server as well. So basically a basic shared hosting is like they're not really managing your WordPress install for you. Managed hosting is where they're managing your WordPress install. So basically they're doing site backups for you and they're, they'll run security scans and they're kind of set up, their server is set up to really support WordPress. Pagely is a really good one. It kind of tells itself as a very scalable option and solution, kind of an enterprise type service. It's a little more expensive, but it's super solid. MediaTemple has a managed WordPress hosting. They're owned by GoDaddy and they have a plan that starts at $20 a month. This is one I use for a couple clients and it turned out great. It's kind of like your really non-technical version. So basically like their dashboard is super easy and their customer service is really great as well. So you can get in there and kind of spin up your site really great, really easily and a cool thing for me is that they, I can start the billing process and I can transfer that billing process to my client, which is really, really awesome. It's kind of, they kind of geared it towards designers and creative agencies, but it's also really great if you wanted to host your business website on it. SiteGround, these guys are here. I've used them for so many clients and it's just really solid. It's definitely more affordable. They do have WordPress hosting, 24-7 support. I mean you can't really beat it for the price. It is an excellent hosting company. But still with managed WordPress hosting, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be taking care of everything for you. So let's talk about site support and maintenance. This is really important. How many of you have ever had an update break things? That's a lot of hands. Me too. So this is the kind of thing, and I was talking to someone, Gabe, I was talking to you out in the hallway about updating and things breaking. So what do you do about this? Sometimes I've had so many people say, I'm so scared to press that update button. It's going to break everything. So this is where we need to pay attention. So common maintenance tasks, security monitoring, site backups, theme and plugin updates, uptime monitoring, small fixes and supporting your website. These are the kind of things that WordPress maintenance services do. And there's services out there which can help you do this because if you're spending all your time doing this and tinkering with your site, you're not out there running your business. So this is maintained. They'll maintain your WordPress investment. So they have plans that start at $49, includes 24-7 security monitoring, off-site backups, core updates. They'll update your plugins for you. They'll update your themes for you. And what happens if everything breaks when they do it? Do they just walk away and take your money? No, they're going to help you out to fix that problem. So $49 a month. What is it going to take to fix those problems when you do it and you're frantically calling your go-to person and they're on vacation or you just can't find that help? That's why these types of services would be really helpful to you. There's also WP Curve. They kind of take care of small jobs in addition to added support and maintenance. Their plan includes unlimited small 30-minute jobs for one site, detailed job notes that come with every little job, and 24-hour live chat and email support. That is a sweet deal for $79 a month. That is really solid. WP Site Care, they have started plans at $29, which include 24-7 security monitoring, daily cloud backups, WordPress theme and plugin updates, real-time activity monitoring, and my favorite WordPress tutorial videos, which I'll talk about in a little bit. That's a great deal and well worth the money if you're getting your site up and running. Another one, WP Valet. They're kind of a full-service support team. They offer services including monthly support. They do site migrations, but they also have this other aspect of their strategy and creative, which is they function like an agency. There's also Codeable, which is a support service that works on small to big jobs. These are WordPress experts who can help you solve problems and fix bugs. I think their pricing is dependent upon what the job is. This is kind of a cool one. It's a task tick. They just do migrations. If you're moving from, say, host to site ground, but you don't really know how to do it, they'll do it for you. A lot of hosts will migrate your site for you, but if they don't, or if you feel like you want more of a hand-held process, these guys will do it for you. What about if you have multiple WordPress sites on your server? Well, here's some tools for maintaining those. Manage WP. This is a service where you have a dashboard and it shows all of your sites, and it shows which themes and plugins need updating. Uptime monitoring and all different kinds of add-ons where you can do security scans on every site all from one place. You're not logging into every site to do all these tasks. Another one is Infinite WP. Now, this one may require a little bit of help to get installed because it's kind of like a separate piece of software that you put on your server, but it will kind of run... Then you install a plugin on all your sites, and it kind of monitors those, and it will give you updates, and you can run scans for security and all kinds of good stuff. This one I just learned about recently called MainWP. I don't know too much about it, but it's kind of the same thing, like WordPress management plugins. And I think that they have add-ons and extensions too, which probably do things like backups and security monitoring and that sort of thing. Jetpack. You all know that Jetpack has a site management tool? So inside Jetpack, there is a site... The table out there, these guys could probably explain it to you. There's a site management tool. So you can go in there and all of your WordPress installs. You can manage from, I think, your WordPress.com account. So you can go in there and see what needs updating. You can update your WordPress install or update your plugins. Super useful. Okay, so there's all these things. There's all these tools. What about WordPress itself? What about learning WordPress? What about, like, I need to figure out how to use WordPress? Well, the first thing is that you're here. You're at WordCamp. Good job. Give yourself a pat on the back. You're learning WordPress. You're diligently trying to... You know, your WordPress site is a business investment. So the more you know about it, the better off you'll be. Give a man some WordPress. He'll publish for a day. Teach a man to WordPress. And he'll publish forever. I don't know who said that. Someone, maybe somewhere. But empower yourself. So first off, we have the WordPress.org codex. If you go to support, there's a little dropdown. I think you can click on documentation. There's all kinds of links here. You can start reading that stuff and figure out how WordPress works. WP101. Learn WordPress the easy way. I love this resource. I point people to this all the time. They're videos. A guy walking through talking about doing X, Y, and Z tasks. Installing plugins, creating pages, posts. It is a membership. You have to sign up. It's well worth it. You can sign up and pay by the month and then, you know, cancel your account if you feel like you've become a master. But it is super great. And they're like three to seven minutes. Very, very detailed. This came along and caught my attention. And it is amazing. So basically it's a plugin. You install it on your site and it will walk through your dashboard and show you how to do something. So you click pages. And it's like, okay, this is your page. And here is where you're going to create your page. Click on the title. And a little bubble goes up and follows and clicks on the title. And then you write something. And then you click next. It's kind of hand-holding you through. But you're doing as you're going. And it's kind of a person. This is an awesome resource. And there is a free plugin. But it also comes with a premium, which has more tutorials installed. WP Sessions. This is a little bit geared towards gaining some WordPress developer designer skills. But it's awesome. And there are some business tracks in there if you want to learn about running your business with WordPress. WP Beginner. So this is a site. It's essentially like a blog. And they publish tutorials on how to do all kinds of stuff with WordPress. It's been around for years. So if you Google anything about how to do something with WordPress and type in WP Beginner after that, you're going to get a result. There's so much good stuff in here. It's such a vast resource of knowledge. There's this thing. If you're more of like an old school, you want to print something out. There's the easy WP guide. It's a PDF. And it's updated usually with every release of WordPress. Maybe not the incremental security releases, but with every big release, they update the guide. And that kind of goes through everything. It's very, very detailed. But if you need something on your desk that you can reference, this might be a good one for you. Okay, what about the community of WordPress? Like how do I know about all this stuff? It's because I've been following the WordPress community because I come to WordCamps. I see what's going on. I find out about these cool things. Something new like Sidekick gets tweeted out and I jump on it and learn about it. So if you want to keep up with the WordPress community, first off, you're in the right place. Again, you're at WordCamp. But there's also some good resources. WPmail.me. Put in your email right there and you'll get a weekly email with all kinds of links to what's going on in the WordPress community. There's themes and plug-ins that are new that come out. There's tutorials. There's kind of the politics of WordPress, all kinds of stuff. WPTabrin is another one. So this one is really great for kind of like what's going on in the WordPress community. Right here they're talking about the 4.2.3 critical security release. Now I get this in my feed reader and then I know about that. Maybe I'm not logged in. I don't know about the release yet. But it's a great way to know what's going on in the community. Post status is an awesome... It's great for long-form content. If you really want to read and just dive into the whole WordPress community, this is a great place. They have a membership program. You can pay $99 a year and become a member. It's really awesome. They have these notes section for club members and just full of all kinds of resources and good stuff. Torque magazine. This is like a WP engine. I think they bought this news resource. It's just got all kinds of articles that are really great. What's going on in the WordPress community? There's also managewp.org, not .com, but .org. They have hacker news for WordPress. They have all these things. You can vote up different types of articles and see what is trending. I really like this guy's blog, Chris Lemma. He writes about really... He'll do reviews of membership plug-ins. I think he's doing some kind of membership plug-in like fiasco right now. He'll talk about different products and he'll stand behind products and talk about his experience with it. Really great, kind of lays a lot of stuff out for you. I've got some links to some of his articles in my blog post, which I'll share at the end. So I kind of want to wrap things up here with a little bit about SEO. Dun, dun, dun. The reason why I want to talk about this is I just want to put it in a little bit of my two cents. Google Webmaster Guideline says that create a useful information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. There's this really awesome article called The Inconvenient Truth about SEO from Smashing Magazine in 2012. I just read it again last week and it was still relevant. The Inconvenient Truth is the best person to improve your ranking is you. If you aggressively spend tons of money on searches and optimization but you're not learning how to create that good content, you're going to have to be spending that money to hire someone to write that content for you. And if you have the money to do that, that's fine, but there's no tricks that are really going to get you to the top of Google necessarily. It's going to be your good content which will help your business succeed. On that note, who knows about Yoast SEO? Yeah, it's a great plugin. His site also, by the way, is a great resource for learning about how to use, one, the plugin, and two, about SEO in general. And then all in one SEO pack. These guys are out here. Go talk to them. It's a great plugin. Thanks. So right here is the link to a blog post that I put out about sharing all those things that I shared in the presentation. And there's also a previous post that I did which I referenced in that one talking mainly about choosing themes. And that's about it. Any questions? Well Squarespace is a different software platform and since we're at WordCamp, I'm mainly talking about WordPress. So Squarespace is another content management system. I'm a big fan of WordPress. I use it all the time. So that's what I recommend. As far as the other one was Bluehost, you said. I've had clients on Bluehost. Some people will like it. I recommend the ones that I shared, the hosting companies. So those are the ones I usually appoint people to. Any other questions? That's a good question. And like I said, I know this answer is super annoying, but it depends. I mean it depends on how much money you can fork out for hosting. Are you talking about the maintaining ones or are you talking about the hosting? Okay, the maintaining ones. Yes, you can. If it's a headache off your shoulders, you could do that. Has anyone used any of those services that I mentioned? WP Engine. But have you used any of the services like the Maintain or the WP Side Care, WP Curve? No. I've heard great things about Maintain. That was the first one. Give it a try, you know? I mean I don't use it because I don't need to, but I've heard great things about it. It hasn't always been around. It's managed WordPress hosting just to clarify. So it's been around for a number of years now. And now all hosting companies, they're probably hosting companies that say they are, like, oh, it's managed and it's really probably just the same thing as shared hosting. They just kind of update your WordPress for you. But, yeah, it's really, and they'll jump on problems for you too, if an update, the thing is, they're also doing backups for you. So if there's an update and something breaks, you can do a site restore from one of your backups. WP Engine, for example, there's a button where you can restore your site right there. It's just like click and it will restore to a previous version. So that's super helpful. If you don't know how to do that, that one button is really, really helpful. So that's an example of kind of a managed approach. Any other questions? No? All right. Okay. That's a good question. I don't know, is that Thai? Does anyone here speak Thai? Oh, does it not work? It works? Down there at the end. Sorry, I used the short link. I could have used the long one. Let me just find, I think it's, I could pull it up. I'll just pull it up, but thanks everyone.