This week special guests Lindsey Riel of Pretty Darn Cute Designs and Jeni Elliott (a.k.a. the Blog Maven) joined me for the 5th installment of Genesis Office Hours. These ladies are crazy busy growing their families (congrats, Jeni!) and their businesses and I appreciated them giving an hour of their time to Genesis Office Hours and sharing their wisdom.
We covered some recurring GOH topics, like theme design, customer support, and Genesis development. On the back half of the show, we dove deep into tips for building your subscriber audience and engaging others with your content via social media. Knowledge bombs were falling all over the place, so be sure to catch a replay of the show.
Thank you to everyone who took the survey last week. Great feedback! Popular vote casts the new show time at 1pm CDT (18:00 UTC), starting this Thursday, April 17th. Mark it on your calendar here.
What We Talked About
Design & Development
- How does she [Lindsey Riel] get feedback on designs for stock themes?
- Why do you go the Illustrator route instead of Photoshop when designing?
- Jeni, where did you learn to illustrate so well?
- Which niches for distributed child themes would you like to see more of from StudioPress? Or other Genesis devs/designers?
- What’s the best way to learn Genesis hooks?
- Since retina devices have become more popular, how do you recommend prepping your graphics to look great?
Business
- Jeni, how much time, or what percentage of your business, is dedicated to coaching?
- Is it better to work on the design aspect or team up with a designer if design and artistic skills are weak?
- Hi Carrie, do you all turn down websites from customers who want something other than Genesis? Or do you take the work?
- Care to expand on ‘discovery’ with clients? billable? cost of prospecting??
- What’s a good way to find people to collaborate with (designers, devs, etc.)?
- When you see the scope of the work changes and the price has to change – do you find it difficult to relay that extra cost to the client?
- Lindsey…how time consuming is supporting your pre-made themes vs. doing custom work for clients like you used to do?
Social (online and IRL)
- I’m attending my first WordCamp. What should I know and bring, etc. Any tips for keeping my significant other occupied?
- Jeni, why don’t you use social connect buttons on your site?
- Jeni, is there an impact on authority without social media ?
- Does anyone actually use App.net?
- What’s your opinion on social sharing buttons on posts?
Show Notes & Links
Plugins & Tools
- Genesis Visual Hook Guide plugin – great way to see where hooks and filters come into play on your Genesis Framework site.
- Slicy – Photoshop slicing tool.
- nicolesclasses.com – great intro Illustrator classes
- Genericons – a free, GPL, flexible icon font for blogs
- Font Awesome – icon font originally designed for Bootstrap
- Dashicons – Custom icon fonts for the WordPress dashboard
Articles & Learning Resources
- How Not to Sell Genesis Themes
- Matt Report Pro – promo code CARRIEISGREAT
- The Top 5 Tools I Use to Get More Blog Subscribers (Free Ebook from Jeni Elliott)
- Using a Discovery Process with Clients
Get Involved
- wpmentor.org – Become a WordPress mentor or find help from the community.
- Public Services announcement from Tom: Hey everybody… if we all grabbed 3 open posts later on StudioPress forums the Genesis community would get all sorts of WordPress love. http://www.studiopress.com/..
- Meet other Genesis users, designers, and developers – Monitor #genesiswp on twitter, join the Google+ Genesis group, or the Facebook Genesis group.
Events
- TADA! Workshop, hosted by Pretty Darn Cute Designs, is a live, one-day event central Texas where you can “Take A Day And” build a website start to finish (TADA!).
- A Very Unofficial Genesis + WordCamp Austin Meetup – Any Genesis users in town for WordCamp Austin are welcome to join us Friday night for an informal gathering.
- WordCamp Austin – April 26th & 27th, 2014
Misc
- Kerfuffle – Use it in a sentence this week
- Tlk.IO – this is where all the chat takes place during Genesis Office Hours (you can scroll through the history to see conversation)