Today, we’re chatting with David Wells, a WordPress developer and inbound marketing expert. His work focuses on helping WordPress business link up technology and cutting-edge marketing strategy to help them drive traffic to their websites. David has done work for Hubspot as an inbound expert, in addition to being active in the WordPress community.
David studied entrepreneurship in school, but didn’t have any formal experience coding. In order to learn how to produce the plugins that Inbound Now sells, David did some heavy Google use and taught himself what he needed to learn. So if anyone out there is reading, but not sure if they have what it takes to code, David would have you use him as an example: “if I can do it, you can do it.”
In David’s own words:
Inbound Now exists to educate marketers and business owners how on to leverage inbound marketing principles to further business goals online. We also specialize in creating user friendly marketing tools and WordPress Plugins that solve real business problems.
Now, onto David’s Answers!
When was the first time that you really got excited about WordPress and at what point did you decide to make it your career?
Back in College, I needed to build out a personal site to showcase some of my case studies and internships I had been working on during school. The idea was to make it dead simple for any job I applied to easily research me and see what I had done and what I was passionate about. There was only 1 problem. I didn’t have enough cash to hire someone to build my site. So I decided to try and do it myself.
I grabbed a blue host account and installed WordPress in a snap. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get up and running with a site. I was hooked at this point.
I started building similar ‘personal branding’ sites for friends, then some other folks wanted sites, and here I am now working full time with WordPress.
I went to school for marketing and entrepreneurship. I had NO formal development training. If I can learn how to code from the interwebs, anyone can. I wrote a post detailing exactly how I taught myself to code did it here. There is absolutely nothing stopping folks from jumping into the world of development.
Where do you go first to get your WordPress news, insights, and updates?
Tons of places! There is no shortage but heres a quick list:
News:
- Must Follow WordPress twitter folks: http://www.davidwells.tv/90-must-follow-wordpress-twitter-accounts/
- For industry buzz/news http://www.wptavern.com/
- For Core Updates: http://make.wordpress.org/core/ email subscription
- For WordPress tutorial videos I subscribe via https://blogtrottr.com/ to the http://wordpress.tv/feed/
– Tutorials:
- Pippins Williamson always has legit tutorials http://pippinsplugins.com/category/tutorials/
- Tom McFarlin is solid on WordPress advice http://tommcfarlin.com/tag/wordpress/
- Anything on Nettuts http://tommcfarlin.com/tag/wordpress/
– WordPress Business Advice:
- Matt Report: http://mattreport.com/
- Chris Lema: http://chrislema.com/
What WordPress consultants deserve more love than they get? Who should we be paying attention to?
There are probably so many out there. Its hard to say. I think there is a large population of badass WordPress devs that just aren’t as vocal as others. They spend a majority of their time building the awesome, instead of blogging about WordPress. Its super hard to do both. Pippin Williamson and Tom McFarlin somehow manage to crank out the awesome content though!
My partner in crime Hudson Atwell is an extremely talented developer. We have built some amazing things together.
What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?
Use Github for version control. Took a while for us to learn that one. You can script github repos to automagically update plugins in the WordPress SVN too. HUGE time saver (Here’s the script I altered and use for this) .
WordPress Cronjobs are your friend when trying to process large amounts of data. There are a number of PHP timeout limitations and they all vary from server to server. A way to mitigate php timeouts is by chunking the processing and running the processes in chunks via the cron tool.
We do a ton of calculations and updates with our WordPress leads plugin and sites with large lead databases required us to rewrite for scale. Crons saved us here.
Install Login Lockdown on any site that doesn’t currently run it. This will mitigate the risk of being hacked tremendously. WP Engine does this for me =)
Confess to us your biggest moment of WordPress fail?
The first commercial plugin we developed didn’t really sell all that well. It was a plugin that allowed users to contextually place calls to action on their sites. So for example, if you used a certain keyword in your content, a contextually relevant call to action would show. Or if a visitor came into your site using a specific keyword, a contextually relevant CTA would try and convert them.
We learned a valuable lesson though, If the plugin has too many bells and whistles it can confuse users. It made us revisit how we build our UIs for our other plugins. It also taught us that highly sophisticated marketing functionality is not top of mind for most site owners, who might just be starting out their journey with inbound marketing.
Simplicity and Solid UI/UX is key in creating a commercially viable plugin.
If you were going to spend this weekend creating a plugin that doesn’t exist, what would it be?
I would probably create a plugin to add the Microsoft Paperclip to the bottom right hand corner of any frontend page. I’m not sure why. Nostalgia, perhaps?
Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?
I usually use a base theme and customize it to my clients needs.
Child themes are all well and good, BUT, I’ve personally run into too many issues with parent themes breaking functionality/styles/classes/ids on the child theme when the parent is updated. Usually we a parent theme updates, its very very very minor stuff and not worth the hassle of fixing the child.
Fork it! When you fork a template you learn a lot about how themes actually work, rather than relying on helper functions from frameworks.
What’s your favorite theme or theme framework? Why?
My favorite theme is Robust. It’s a solid theme with a ton of extras baked in. I’ve used it to create a number of sites.
I try and avoid theme frameworks because of the little things that overwrite default WordPress functionality. I’ve sent hours trying to make simple things work as they should and the theme de registering or filtering WordPress core functions were the culprits.
Theme Frameworks are great for non devs but I’d prefer to use my own base setup to build sites.
Plugin frameworks are another story though. Some plugin boilerplates/frameworks are awesome to incorporate. Tread lightly though, depending on too many third party frameworks can bite you.
Favorite plugin?
WordPress SEO is on every site I build. Solid plugin from a guy who gets SEO. And our inbound marketing plugins of course =)
Least favorite plugin?
Any plugin that has poorly written broken javascript and/or any plugin that deregisters WordPress jQuery for Googles CDN jQuery. No good, stop it.
Thesis framework. I know its not a plugin, but it is (in my opinion) quite possibly the worst WordPress framework and has caused me too many headaches to count. They forked so much of WordPress’s core functionality away that a number of our plugins will not work with folks using thesis as their theme backend. Worse yet, I couldn’t reach anyone there to help troubleshoot/pull request updates to fix these issues.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Custom Post Types?
We built a lead management system with Custom Post Types. The CPT tracks every activity the site visitor does on your site and can give you some valuable sales data.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that WordPress consultants will face in 2013?
The biggest challenge is underpricing ourselves. I see a ton of folks pricing stuff at a free/cheap level in order to compete. But in reality cheaper prices are driving the market down.
Charge more money for what you do, if you are skilled with WordPress, people will be willing to pay the big bucks.
If you could change one thing today about WordPress, what would it be?
I would change the widgets interface and rename ‘sidebars’ to something more apt.
I would also revamp the WordPress review process on plugins. We get some nasty reviews from people who have problems being caused by other plugins that hurt us. It’s not fair for someone to leave a negative review when your plugin isn’t the cause of their issues. Probably one of the biggest bummers in the business.
Where do you see WordPress going in the next 2-3 years?
WordPress is most likely going to take over the global economy, solidify all countries under one global power called WordPressia, and create world peace.
Before this though, I’d say WordPress is moving more into the platform space and should be a solid framework in which to build apps on top of. Scalability is a probably the biggest issue here. I’m excited for the new JSON API to come out in core and to see what folks are going to do with it.
Tell us a story where you saved the WordPress day for yourself or on a client project. What made the difference for you?
I don’t work with other CMSs, so WordPress saves the day everyday.
What’s the biggest misconception you encounter about WordPress, and how do you clear it up for your clients?
One main thing is that WordPress is insecure. About 99.9999999%* of hacks on a WordPress site occur because the admin user has malware/keyloggers on their local machine.
If you lock down your login to specific known IP addresses, lockout brute force attacks, and keep WordPress core + plugins up to date. You shouldn’t have any issues.
If you were interviewing another WordPress developer for a job, what is the first question you would ask and why?
I’d ask to see what they have built or what they would like to build. I think having a product vision is critical when hiring new folks. I can tell people to do stuff all day but when there is a dialog of ideas and features to build, something magical happens.
What did I miss? Here’s your chance to fill in the blanks and add something you want people to know about you!
We have been working for the past year to build an all in-compassing inbound marketing system for WordPress: WordPress Landing Pages, WordPress Leads, and WordPress Calls to Action . They are free plugins for anyone to use.
The different plugins were developed as a framework for other designers/developers who want to implement their own landing page or call to action designs and do A/B testing, track conversions etc.
We built the plugins to be fully extendable and are always thrilled when we get pull requests on github to add additional hooks for devs to use.
Drop me a line @DavidWells on twitter if you have any questions on that stuff!
Thanks David!
Visit InboundNow to check out the work that David and his team do, see if their plugins will fit your needs, and help you drive more inbound traffic!
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