Since the call was taking place before the workday begins each morning, I didn’t immediately join  because as a West Coaster, the call starts pretty darn early. Although we’re only talking about 15 minutes, I really enjoy sleeping and I thought the extra 15 minutes of sleep was more valuable. Then one morning, my dog woke me up extra early with an urgent need to be let outside. There wasn’t enough time to go back to sleep, so I poured an extra large mug of coffee and hopped on the call. That one call was enough to change my schedule so I could join every morning.

The format is simple. Ben starts the call by reading that day’s topic and passage from John Maxwell’s Daily Reader. Sometimes, he’ll have a specific question or two about the day’s topic that kicks off the conversation. Most days, that’s not even needed, as somebody typically has a story to share related to the topic. From there, we discuss how to use similar situations in positive ways.

For example, a recent topic centered around encouraging the dreams of others. We discussed ways to handle situations where somebody’s dream for their future might not sound realistic to you. Do you offer words of encouragement? Do you tell them you think they’re crazy? How about shifting the conversation into what sort of skills they might need to attain that dream?

Many times, the topic is bigger than a 15-minute call can handle and we end up having a follow-up chat via Slack throughout the day. I asked Ben what made him decide to start this call.

The old adage, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,’ is near and dear to my heart. I want to be a conduit for others’ success in life. From an early age, people have come to me for help. I would help to the best of my ability, but I knew my efforts were mediocre and I was missing out on something truly powerful and transformative. Personal growth is a passion, and when I ran across John Maxwell’s teachings, things began to click and I knew I was on to something big. I had found that missing piece. In 2017, I became a John Maxwell Certified Team Member (JMT). The JMT provided me with the training and resources to help others that I had been missing all my life. When I looked around WebDevStudios, I saw that we had technical growth programs but nothing growing us as individuals. I wanted to start something that would be impactful and more than a one-time event—something that was continually valuable for everyone on the team. A short, 15-minute, daily call is how the vision shaped out. The call was designed to be an open-format discussion over a particular topic which I would read at the beginning. Topics range from managing your emotions, to teamwork, to leading teams, with the core of every call growth-oriented.

For me, the calls have been extremely beneficial. The most obvious benefit being that by starting each day with a little critical thinking, I have found that I’m immediately more engaged in my work each morning. When the call ends and I dive into work, my brain is already in gear and ready to attack the day. While this is a great benefit and I’m certainly not discounting it any, I dare say it’s the second best thing to come from the calls.

As I mentioned earlier, once the topic is read, somebody has a story to share that relates. It could be a situation that came up at a previous job, something that happened with a mentor or mentee, or even a situation involving family members. No topic is off limits and sometimes the stories can get deeply personal. I remember a story a coworker told about a painful memory they had when they lashed out at work out of frustration and immediately regretted it, not because they got in trouble or anything like that, but because their action hurt somebody’s feelings and potentially ruined a relationship. I felt for them because I’ve been in that situation myself. It was a great reminder that we all make mistakes, but we can learn from them and become better leaders.

As a fully remote team, it can be tough to get to know your coworkers deeply. We don’t get the opportunity to regularly head out for a drink after work or hang out on the weekends. During business hours, we’re pretty much in constant contact, but that’s typically to discuss the task at hand. We use Slack and have a number of topical channels to discuss things like sports, TV shows, etc, but it’s not the same as being in the same brick-and-mortar office day after day. Building relationships takes an extra effort. Having this opportunity to learn more about my coworkers has been extremely gratifying.

There has been one other benefit of the growth calls, and from the name of the call it should be obvious: personal growth. Since I started joining the calls, I’ve had countless opportunities to think back on situations in my business career, in my social life, in my family life, and even in my marriage that are similar to those being discussed on the calls. Learning how others have handled similar situations can be enlightening.

While there isn’t always a 100% right way to handle a situation, there’s almost always a wrong way. I have already found that by applying some of the lessons I’ve learned from the calls in my day-to-day life that I’m having better and more engaging interactions with coworkers, clients, friends, and family.

I encourage you to create a group of your own and start sharing. You’ll be glad you did.

The post How WDS Growth Calls Inspire a Productive and Passionate Remote Work Environment appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Product Types

In general, there are three types of products people sell online: tangible products, digital products, and memberships/subscriptions. Each product type has its own set of hurdles. In this post, I’m going to look at these three product types and point out some of the questions you should be asking yourself before you set out on your quest to utilize WordPress plugins for your eCommerce business. I won’t be covering the generic business decisions you’ll need to make—like your return policy—but instead will focus on the questions that will determine how your online store will work.

Let’s dive right in!

Tangible Products

If you were looking to start a business selling tangible products, such as shoes, housewares, art supplies, etc., in a brick-and-mortar store, you’d have to deal with leasing a space, getting proper licensing, buying showcases, staffing, security, and a myriad of other details. While you don’t have to deal with this same set of issues when selling online, there’s still plenty to consider. For example:

• What credit card processor will you use?
• Do you need to charge tax? For all sales or just in some states?
• Do you ship all over the world, or just to your country or state?
• What shipping methods do you offer?
• What are your shipping rates?

These questions are the tip of the iceberg. And, each time you answer one of these questions, it leads to another set of questions. It can be frustrating. Nobody ever said starting a business would be easy. If they did, they were probably trying to sell you something.

So, what WordPress plugin should you use to sell tangible products online? We recommend WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is an extremely powerful eCommerce platform. And, with roughly 300 add-on plugins available, it’s also quite flexible. Finding the exact set of add-on plugins you’ll need will mainly have to do with your specific shop requirements, but there’s little doubt that it can be handled by WooCommerce. Just be prepared to spend some time getting everything set up exactly the way you want. Or, hire somebody (like us) to help.

Digital Products

With digital products, the number of questions you have to answer declines quite a bit. Don’t get too excited. There are still plenty of mysteries to solve, but not having to deal with shipping physical products will make this process feel simple by comparison.

For digital products, you may want to sell individual items like an image or a PDF. Or, you may want to sell plugins like we do at Pluginize. No matter the type of digital product you are looking to sell, our plugin recommendation doesn’t change. For digital product sales, you need to check out Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). Powerful right out of the box, and with over 100 add-ons available, EDD is also super flexible and should be able to handle just about any scenario you can throw at it.

As a side note, if you plan to sell WordPress plugins, EDD’s Software Licensing add-on makes it easy for your buyers to update their plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard each time you release an update. WooCommerce has a similar option available that is far more complicated.

Memberships/Subscriptions

For memberships and subscriptions, it isn’t so much about what you are selling to your customers that’s important. What your customers need access to once they’ve signed up is where things can get complicated.

At it’s absolute easiest, I’ve seen WordPress used to sell memberships for groups that meet offline. The membership software was solely used as a simple way to collect monthly dues from members with no requirements for extra access to anything on the website other than the ability to manage their membership. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done.

Membership plugins can also make it easy to provide access to private content on your website. For some, this may be as easy as having one membership level where all private content is available to all members. But others may need something more complex with multiple membership levels, prices, and access to different content based on those levels.

For both simple and complex scenarios, my recommendation is Restrict Content Pro (RCP). With RCP, you can easily create automatic recurring memberships and provide your members access to just the right content.

One side note about creating memberships and giving users access to specific content, you may find yourself wanting to customize the menu items users see once they’re logged in. I found this plugin and this tutorial to be extremely helpful for customizing the menus for specific users and user levels.

These aren’t the only options

No matter how great these recommended plugins are, they are definitely not your only options. MemberPress is another fantastic plugin for handling memberships and subscriptions, and that’s just one example. You may need to test a couple out to see which suits you best, especially if you have unique requirements and need something hyper-specific. You may even want to reach out to the authors of the plugins to see if their plugin will suffice.

Selling products can be a daunting task. However, with the recommendations I’ve provided above, your eCommerce shop could be up and running in no time. Happy selling!

The post The Most Trusted WordPress Plugins for eCommerce appeared first on WebDevStudios.

But First… an Overview

The Gutenberg editor will completely replace the current post editor you have been using with your standard WordPress installation. In other words, creating content in WordPress is going to be a whole new experience with Gutenberg. For example, if you’re creating a blog post, you may start with a block of text. Then you add a block that contains an image, and then you add another block of text. Each block can then be edited individually, including the order in which the blocks are displayed.

Two Disclaimers

There are two things I want to make clear before we go any further:

1. Until recently, I would have said the Gutenberg WordPress editor is a way of editing the content on your website, but as I’ve learned, the longterm plans for it involve the ability to edit all aspects of your website.
2. WordPress’ Gutenberg is still in active development and isn’t planned to be ready until at least April 2018. It’s important to remember that things will continue to change, even after you’ve read this blog post. Gutenberg will get better itself and third-party themes and plugins will get better at integrating with it.

For now, though, we’re only going to focus on how the Gutenberg editor affects the existing content on your website with a standard WordPress installation (not page builders; we’ll cover that another time). Now, let’s dig in.

Converting Content To Blocks

After you install the Gutenberg plugin, when you edit a page, you’re going to see the new editor. By default, Gutenberg will treat all of the existing content on the page as a single HTML block. As you can see from the screenshot, you have the ability to leave the page as-is and simply edit the page as HTML. This may be fine for users who are comfortable editing raw HTML, but that’s not why we’re here now, is it?

Just below the “Edit as HTML” menu item is another important item: “Convert to blocks.” When clicked, this button will convert all of the content into individual blocks.

If your page contains nothing but paragraphs of text, each paragraph will become its own block of text. If you have mixed content, like in the “Contact Us” page example, the text and shortcodes each became their own individual blocks. As you can see, the shortcode is now clearly defined and I can edit it, or any of the text blocks on their own.

While the visual in the admin area has changed, your website visitors won’t see a difference in the content. To them, it will look the exact same as it did before the content conversion.

Editing Individual Blocks

Now that content has been converted into blocks, we have the ability to edit each content block on its own. This is where the true power of the Gutenberg WordPress editor shines.

In this screenshot example, I am editing the top block of text. You can see from the available tools on the right, the font size and color can be modified, but I can also add a background color to the block of text as a whole. Also, I can add a unique CSS Class name to this block, which will make it easy to target for adding additional custom CSS.

The list of available editing tools on the righthand side will change based on the type of content you are editing. At the time of this writing, there are 23 different block types including Image, Gallery, Heading, Quote, List, Video and a whole lot more. There are also 35+ simple embed options from different sites (for example, YouTube). You simply drop the embed block where you want it to show up, paste in the YouTube video URL, and you’re all set.

Big Change ≠ Bad Change

In the beginning, I made the mistake of listening to all the complaining on the internet about Gutenberg. It helped form my early impression that Gutenberg was the devil before I had even installed it and given it a try. This was a huge mistake on my part as a large portion of those complaining about it probably haven’t even tried it themselves.

So, before you start looking at alternative platforms to run your website, I’m here to assure you that the sky is not falling. There have been other big changes that have come to WordPress (the Customizer comes to mind) that we all survived. The Gutenberg WordPress editor is a big change. And, most people fear change. I get that.

Many of my concerns were put to rest when I watched this presentation from WordCamp US. I suggest you do the same. Then, set up a copy of your site on a development server and install the Gutenberg plugin. Try it out for yourself.

I’ve only touched the surface of Gutenberg and how it will affect your website. In the weeks and months to come, I will be researching how Gutenberg affects page editors such as Beaver Builder and Visual Composer, and how it affects themes with their own page builders built in, such as Divi. There’s no need to fear change, but being prepared and informed is definitely a smart move!

The post How Existing Content Will Be Affected by Gutenberg WordPress Editor appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Earlier this summer when we launched the redesign for Maintainn.com, the ongoing website maintenance arm of WebDevStudios, we were really focused on making things less complicated for our clients. You can read on our Maintainn blog about some of the behind-the-scenes work we did to make the signup process for support services easier than ever. Next, we wanted to make contacting our team simpler, too. For us, the answer was live chat.

Live chat is a tricky business solution and isn’t something I would suggest jumping into without some careful consideration first. The most important aspect of any contact method is your ability to remain consistently reliable. For example, with a contact form, a response to a user’s question in one to two days is reasonable. With a phone call, picking up immediately or returning a voicemail hours later is perfectly acceptable. But with live chat, somebody must be available at the exact moment your visitors are visiting your website.

Instant Gratification and Other Benefits

Many times when visitors use the live chat feature, it’s because they’re looking for information to help them make a decision. The ability to provide that visitor with the answer they need immediately could easily be the difference between closing the sale or watching them head over to your competitor’s website.

Live chat is also an opportunity for you to build confidence with your customers. I’ve had multiple people send a chat request simply to verify our authenticity.

“I just wanted to see if I’d be able to reach a real person,” they explain. When they see that they can, in fact, reach a real person, I know that I’ve captured their trust. I’m not a bot, but rather, someone on which they can rely.

One thing to note: you don’t have to keep your live chat available 24 hours, seven days a week. We don’t. The Maintainn live chat option is only available during our normal business hours. We have it automated to open and close at specific hours on specified days.

The part that I didn’t expect to encounter when we set up live chat was how much we would learn about our own website. When a visitor is asking a question, it likely means that the answer they are seeking isn’t easily found on your website. Or, if you find yourself thinking, “The answer is RIGHT THERE,” this may be a perfect opportunity to reevaluate how your business, service, and product information are displayed. Perhaps it isn’t as clear and obvious as you think it is. Take what you learn from your live chat customers and apply it toward improving your website.

Selecting a Solution

While there are a number of live chat services available, finding one that fits your workflow is imperative. Some require you to be logged into their website where the chats take place in a web browser. Others offer mobile apps that allow you to answer chats even while you’re away from your desk.

There are also a number of WordPress plugins available for adding live chat to your website. Some of them are companion plugins associated with third-party services, while others are standalone.

As a distributed company, WebDevStudios (including the team at Maintainn) relies heavily on Slack for company communications and internal organization. So, as we searched for a live chat solution, we discovered Chatlio.

As the official live chat app fully integrated with Slack, Chatlio allows me to provide Maintainn website visitors with the customer service they seek without additional browser tabs open or software. Providing live chat support is just one of my job roles. I still need to be able to make sales calls, work on project proposals, and complete other tasks daily. Chatlio provides me with a way to multitask.

Chatlio may not be the answer for you. But if you invest the time in researching your options and trying a couple out, I’m sure you’ll find a live chat resource that fits your need.

In Summary

Simply stated, live chat is another great opportunity to connect with your visitors and provide them with a way to get a hold of you. It’s a way for you to build trust while answering their questions on the spot. Plus, you will learn about ways to improve and strengthen your website.

It may seem a bit intimidating and as though it’s a big responsibility (it is), but live chat truly could be the edge you’re looking for to take your website and business to the next level of success.

The post Is Live Chat a Good Idea for Your Website? appeared first on WebDevStudios.

You don’t have to be a technology expert or a seasoned software coder to keep your website safe. Just by using the following tips, every team member who contributes to your website can assist with strengthening its security, no matter what their job role is in the organization.

Password Managers and Passphrases

I know, I know. You’ve already been preached to on the importance of a strong password. That hasn’t stopped people from using passwords like “123456,” “qwerty,” or any variant of “Pa$$w0rd!” So I’ll say it again, a strong password is vital.

Writing your password down on a piece of paper stuck to the back of the monitor is a no-no, too. But you knew that already, right?

“I’ll never remember a really long, complicated password,” is an argument I’ve heard several times. I have two recommendations to get around this.

• Invest in a password manager. Consider setting up accounts with Last Pass, or my personal favorite, 1Password. With a password manager, having a 30+ character random password for a website is no problem. When it comes time to log in, you simply copy/paste it from your password manager rather than having to recall it from memory.
• Use a passphrase. Maybe you prefer to keep your password memorized. That’s fine. But I urge you to consider using a passphrase. I tend to use full sentences comprised of song lyrics or a quote from a movie. For example, “Carry on my wayward son. For there’ll be peace when you are done.” or “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Staying Protected While Using Public WIFI

When we travel, or even if we’re just working from the local coffee shop, we typically don’t think twice about connecting to the free WIFI and diving into work. While you may think it’s far fetched, having your login credentials stolen while on public WIFI is a very real possibility. And while there’s no way to 100% guarantee it’s not going to happen, one thing you can do to limit the risk of hacking is to make sure you are connected to your site using a secure connection.

In the screenshot above, the Chrome browser has displayed the word “Secure,” and the URL starts with https://. This lets us know that the website we’re browsing has a Secure certificate, and the data passed between the browser and the website’s server is being encrypted prior to being sent. If you do not see the word “Secure” and the URL starts with http://, data passed between the two is being done in plain text. If that’s the case, I would think twice about logging in over public WIFI, and encourage your IT team to set up an SSL Certificate right away.

Another option for those who frequently use public WIFI, you might want to consider investing in a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Question Everything

Criminals, hackers, and ne’er-do-wells are always looking for new ways to steal sensitive data.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term phishing, and if you’re like me, you probably think that you’re too smart to fall for a phishing attack. But under the right set of circumstances, I don’t care how careful you are, it can happen to any one of us. Don’t think so? Check out this post and let me know if this makes you think otherwise.

Not all security attacks happen online. In one of my favorite books, The Art of Deception, the author explains the art of Social Engineering and how it can be used to trick somebody into simply handing over their login credentials. Again I say, if you don’t think it can happen to you, I strongly suggest you read the book.

Keeping your website safe and secure is a team effort. Staying on your toes and always being alert is the key!

The post The Part You Play in Your Website’s Security appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s move on.

In 2010, WebDevStudios released the first version of the Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) plugin to the WordPress plugin directory. At the time, Custom Post Types were brand new to WordPress and creating your own post types required (and still does, really) a complicated chunk of code. With CPTUI, the hard part was done for you. CPTUI quickly became popular with developers as a time-saving tool. So much so, that in July of 2015, 5 years after it’s initial release, the plugin passed the one million downloads mark.

I asked Brad Williams, our CEO and original developer of CPTUI if he had any idea the plugin would be so popular. He said,

Believe it or not, I absolutely knew CPTUI would be this popular. When Custom Post Types was introduced during the core development of WordPress 3.0, I immediately knew the impact it would have on the entire platform. I also knew, since the only way to register custom post types was via code, that most users would struggle with this so the idea of a UI for custom post types registration was born. We released the initial plugin before 3.0 was released and when the final version was announced, our plugin exploded overnight!

Growth, Change, and Reach

2016 has been an exciting year for CPTUI. In February, I was hired as Director of Products for WebDevStudios, and one of my first projects was helping to clean up the UI for CPTUI. We’ve focused on bringing it more in line with the standard WordPress dashboard aesthetic.

A couple months later, we released a paid add-on plugin called CPTUI Extended making it easy for non-developers to display their CPT data in pages and posts without writing a single line of code!

At the beginning of summer, the plugin hit another exciting milestone when the active install count jumped to 300,000. This is a gigantic number and places CPTUI easily in the top 100 plugins in the WordPress directory, which currently has 47,000+ plugins! All the while keeping a 4.6 average user rating.

This summer the plugin was also accepted into the GoDaddy WordPress Plugin Partner Program, and is consistently listed in the GoDaddy Hot 100 plugins list.

Wait. How many??

I said it before, 2016 has been pretty exciting. Today, specifically, even more so as we’re thrilled to announce that Custom Post Type UI has just passed the 2 million download mark!

It took 5+ years to reach the one million download mark and only 15 short months to double it. So, yeah, we’re pretty excited!

The success and growth of the plugin is largely due to WordPress itself becoming more popular and growing from a simple blog platform into a full-fledged content management system. CPT UI is ever evolving to stay current with everything that can be done with Custom Post Types. It’s exciting to think where the plugin will be by this time next year. You can follow along with the development (or submit a pull request) on Github, or download the current release from WordPress.org.

The post CPTUI Celebrates 2 million downloads! appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Constant Contact has been a leader in the email marketing industry for the past two decades. Providing an email marketing platform for businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily get up and running with email marketing. Honestly, that’s only a sliver of what they do. Their mission statement reads: “To empower small businesses and nonprofits to grow customer relationships and succeed.” Now that’s something we can definitely get behind!

Constant Contact Forms for WordPress, a free plugin in the WordPress plugin directory, provides site owners a simple way to add forms to their site to collect data from visitors. For small business businesses looking to get their feet wet with email marketing, this plugin is a perfect fit.

When Constant Contact reached out to us about creating their official plugin, they wanted to ensure the plugin’s benefits wouldn’t be limited to existing Constant Contact users. It was important to them that site owners who have never used Constant Contact could still use the plugin to collect data from their visitors, and when they’re ready, they could sign up for a Constant Contact account right through the plugin.

For Constant Contact users, the plugin’s power goes way deeper. The plugin taps into Constant Contact’s powerful API and makes it effortless to map your form fields to the proper fields in your Constant Contact account. Each form submission can be seen in your Constant Contact account instantly. Small business owners looking to get started with email marketing are going to find the process!

We’re extremely excited to be working with Constant Contact on this project. And with the plugin being released to wordpress.org this week, we’re even more excited to get to work on some of the exciting additions we’ve got planned for the next version. Plus, the amazing support team at Pluginize will be handling all support requests via the wordpress.org support forum. So as you can see, the plugin and its users are both in great hands!

Download a copy of Constant Contact Forms for WordPress today and let us know what you think!

The post The Official Constant Contact WordPress Plugin is Live! appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We had such a great time doing the first webinar, we wanted to turn right around and do it all over again. So mark your calendar: On October 6th, 2016, we’re hosting our next webinar: Your WordPress Site Into a Mobile App, hosted by me, John Hawkins.

A couple of months back, after being head down in AppPresser, I decided to learn firsthand what it takes to turn a WordPress site into a mobile app. I wanted to learn the entire process, from start to finish (using both AppPresser and otherwise), and so I did!

If you’ve been wondering how to do it, don’t miss this opportunity to pick my brain on the process. I’ll be sharing what worked, what didn’t, the shortcuts I discovered, and the pitfalls I came across.

Here are the details:

Turn Your WordPress Site Into A Mobile App

Date: October 6th, 2016
Time: 1pm – 2pm ET

Signup Here

The webinar is totally free; all you have to do is sign up! For those of you who can’t make it day of, we will be providing a recording of the talk as well–just make sure you put your info in beforehand so we can send it out to you afterward.

We hope to see you there (and psst…if there are any questions that are pressing now and that you’d like to see addressed, drop them in the comments)!

The post Free Webinar: Turn Your WordPress Site Into a Mobile App appeared first on WebDevStudios.