Reboot: The Launch of Officehours.fm

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hello everybody! It is my tremendous pleasure to welcome you to office hours.fm formally known as Genesis Office hours. This is episode number 53 and we’ve got pretty much amazing stuff in store today. I think I might say that pretty much might say to every episode today is more true than ever I’ve got Brian Krogsgard here with me today. Hey Brian! How are you doing?

Brian: I’m good. How are you?

Carrie: Doing all right. So we’re going to be talking with Brian. So there are some housekeeping things to know. I know we still got people trickling in from where ever they may all be. Apologies that officehours.fm – you may be getting a redirect loop there. Never fear! If you go over to Google+ I just tweeted a link out where you can catch the show over there. And in case you are not privy to the Twitters if you just go over to Google+ and do a search for office hours.fm. That will bring up a result with today’s episode that you can click through there and listen to it. We will have the Q&A app up so you’re more than welcome to submit questions there if you’re watching it over on Google+ or if you’re watching it on Twitter, just use @officehoursfm somewhere within that tweet and we’ll get it and answer it on the show. So Brian before we dig in I want to thank the show sponsors that let me do this week after week and that is Managewp who is a one-stop shop for managing all of your WordPress dashboards in one place. It is a huge timesaver so check them out at managewp.com. Also the beloved desktop server. I am sorry Mark that website was long overdue for a revamp. They just got it this week serverpress.com relaunched a beautiful new site and you can even download their product – desktop server for free which makes working with WordPress installs locally pretty much the easiest thing since making toast. All right. With that said Brian we’ve got five people doing awesome giveaways for today shows and you may just be one of them.

Brian: Maybe. We’ll find out.

Carrie: During the show will be announcing some winners of that giveaway. Brian for folks that don’t have the pleasure of already following you on Twitter or knowing who you are or following you on twitter being familiar with Post Status give a little run down of who you are and what you do.

Brian: Sure. I am a self taught WordPress developer and I started messing around with websites in 2008. Got real serious about it in 2010 which was when I started writing about WordPress while I was learning. 2011 I went full time. January 2013 I started Post Status as the blog. Just last December I made Post Status my full-time job by creating a partnership and membership component to the site. So Post Status is what I do all day everyday.

Carrie: So what is that membership component? How is that different from just going to Post Status? Is it poststatus.com and poststat.us?

Brian: It used to be poststat.us and I relaunched as poststatus.com. The free blog is still there. I like to say it’s 1 to 3 posts a week but members get a daily email newsletter that is 3 to 6 stories maybe where I cover news that’s happening in the day and it’s definitely geared towards WordPress professionals. So for people who are making a living on WordPress versus just people that have a site on WordPress. So that’s kind of the meat of the membership. However, there are other features like a slack channel where we all hang out. There are about 200 people in there. There are also some deals from partners that are coming that are well more worth than the membership cost itself. Then there are resources that will be members only and some other fun things. But the meat of it is a daily newsletter communication channel. It’s $99 a year and it is a lot of fun.

Carrie: And we are giving away one of those today on the show. I would say it’s well worth it. I don’t think I was your earliest supporter because you launched the weekend of Pressnomics and I’m leery about making financial transactions on public wi-fi so I waited until I got home to join up with you on that. I love it. I love the curated content just landing in my inbox daily. Even though it’s not like complex to go click on a url. It’s just not the way I like consume information so having your digest in the inbox has been a nice little treat. Brian I am going to I am going to take a quick pause for a minute. There are still some folks trickling in and a couple of announcements if you’re just listening. There is no # hashtag for this show. Some of you in the past are used to using #officefm. If you slip up and use that I will see it. However, I encourage you to use @officehoursfm which is the Twitter handle for this podcast. If you put it anywhere in your tweet we’ll see it and we will get your questions to Brian or myself. Also, there is an amazing person over at Copyblogger. His name is Matt Laurence. He just busted his tail to clear the cache over on officehours.fm. So if you are getting the redirect loop there that should be situated. If not, we’ve got a link on our Twitter from the officehours.fm on our twitter feed where you can watch the show live over on Google+. All right! Whew. How was that?

Brian: Good.

Carrie: All right. Man! I am nervous today Brian. So much energy. I know that you haven’t been listening to podcasts and there’s no hard feelings there. But you thought it was a podcast just for Genesis folks because the name was Genesis Office Hours. Is that fair?

Brian: Yeah. I hope you’ll forgive me for my confusion.

Carrie: Oh I totally forgive you for your confusion. No worries. That was part of the reason for my transitioning over to officehoursfm. I felt like a lot of the things we talk about on the show and the guests that I have on the show while we have talked some great things about Genesis through really a ton of content and information and tips and tricks that are helpful to an audience beyond that. So by rebranding that’s my hope that we’re not seen as the Genesis podcast but the folks like you will come and join in the party. So we talked a little bit about Post Status can you talk a little bit more about…First of all I really don’t know how you have ever had the time to do Post Status and have a full-time job but what was your final tipping point to crossover leave your full-time job and do Post Status full-time?

Brian: Well I was the director of operations at Range which is a small agency but we were doing pretty big work. I was doing a lot of the sales and project management in addition to development work and basically it came to a choice because I was working really long hours at Range especially in the last few months as we were growing and hiring you know bringing on a lot of new clients and Post Status either had to go away or I had to go all in. I just couldn’t the end of the day put it aside. Something I was too passionate about. I love writing about WordPress and what I was afraid of is I had never really worked for myself before. I came from an engineering background and work for two agencies. I was nervous about how I could support myself so I did actually this blog post in September where I was kind of like this is some of the stuff I’m thinking about doing with Post status at the time. I didn’t know that I would quit my job at it really know what it would be got talked about how I might monetize the site and a lot of people commented on it saying that they would pay for a membership model which was one things that I had teased. In addition to Human Maze cofounder Tom. He actually said that he would buy everyone in his company a membership. So to me that was huge validation so what I did was line up some upfront year-long partnerships with 12 WordPress companies and that was worth $30,000. Those are $2500 for the year which even if I got no memberships and the thing was a total bomb that would float it for the first few months while I find out it’s a failure (laughing) and allow me to you know figure out what to do next and make Post Status either part-time thing or whatever. Fortunately it was not a failure. We’re over about 260 members 265 members today and it’s been a huge success. I crossed the $60,000 revenue mark last week.

Carrie: Awesome.

Brian: So even if nothing else happens, I’m feeling good and that anxiety was mostly unnecessary.

Carrie: Not unnecessary. Anytime you’re taking all jump out on a limb especially to leave a consistent paycheck I would say that it does warrant anxiety but…

Brian: It does but you know the WordPress economy is in a pretty good place so really the worst case scenario was go back to Range. They were great. They said like if you want come back you know you’ll be welcomed back with open arms and also our economy is fantastic right now so that getting a job as a WordPress developer is not the hardest thing in the world. So I knew there was something I could do if it totally bombed. However, I invested enough years into writing about WordPress and trying to establish myself in this world that I was hopeful and hesitantly confident that it could work and so far it is working.

Carrie: Awesome. Well Brian while never let it be said that I don’t listen to my listeners and here’s what I’m getting off the Twitter feed right now. Everyone misses # hashtag. So thanks to my slack, I don’t want to call you minions. Your just slack maze balls that are back there behind-the-scenes looking at things and we’re just gonna claim officefm. So #officefm. If you really want use a # instead of the twitter handle go for it. I am now monitoring that channel. Nobody has tweeted on it for like the month so I think it’s safe. We’re just gonna take it.

Brian: Any it an enthusiastic Microsoft podcasts?

Carrie: You know I don’t know. Did you hear the news that Internet Explorer is going the way of the dodo bird? Like…was that april fools?

Brian: No it’s real. Hoppin on the spartan bandwagon.

Carrie: That’s amazing. That’s good news for web developers everywhere. Although I was at the squares conference this past weekend put on by Ismael Burciaga and he also does the circles conference I’m sorry ish if I just butchered you last name. But there was a guy there is a talking about responsive typography and he kind of made me feel a little bit bad about hating on IE especially since I’ve been a very vocal advocate of web accessibility. You shouldn’t be hating on people just because their browser is not as amazing as the browser you use. So I took that will slap on the wrist and took it home.

Brian: You know IE6 was revolutionary in 2001. (laughs)

Carrie: You know it was. I think. You know it would have shipped with the os. I’m just remembering when I actually used to go buy windows software off the shelf in a box. Back as early as probably windows 3.1. bought it in a box. Those were great days.

Brian: The good thing is Microsoft is working just as hard, or is just as enthusiastic now about web standards as other people. They actually…I don’t know if you’re familiar with their ten year support philosophy. That’s why they kept some of those browsers around for so long because it was a corporate policy to support software for 10 years. So they actually I think abandoned that for their browser product so that’s why they do the forced upgrades now. So hopefully web standards will be around the long haul now that most of the makers are kind of on board to make things consistent across browser.

Carrie: Interesting. 10 years ago that wasn’t a bad goal but technology is changed so rapidly. Well I guess technology is doubling all the time anyway. It’s just that it looks so different than it did don’t know if that would be a realistic statement where I could say I can support this exact same version of the software for 10 years to come that would be a nightmare.

Brian: Yeah.

Carrie: We’ve got some questions for you Brian. Inquiring minds want to know how much time do you spend per day on your favorite websites and resources for preparing your both your newsletter content and your site content?

Brian: Davinder Singh. That is an awesome name. So actually my tendency has been to publish the newsletter late in the evening, so like maybe between 10 pm and 2 am. That’s after a full day of kind of filtering the news and checking out every resource I can to and make sure that I am delivering the best stuff that can. The actual preparation of the newsletters is using the custom post types are called notes and getting the notes that I decided are the best ones and prepping it publishing those spreading it to the newsletter and getting it into mailchimp and sending it out is really only about an hour long process. However, it usually takes most of the day of reading everything on earth to figure out the best stuff to put in the newsletter coz I really don’t put everything. That’s one of the features. I spend most of the day not just collecting that but also working on the longer form stuff that I write so for the free blog or resources that I’ve been working on approving profiles. There is a profile section for members and organizations and building out site features. I built the whole site in a month and that included Christmas and New Year’s so it launched in a super alpha state and has a lot of work that I still need to do. So the daytime stuff is when I’m working on those types of things and also sometimes I will do interviews or research where I’m pinging people that have heard rumors about and I’m trying to get some scoops. So that’s usually what I do during the day.

Carrie: Well, you are a beast. I always thought okay he’s taking his sweet time writing these things. Because it takes me…oh gosh…it takes me probably four hours to write a blog post and I don’t know there are of probably 800,000 words or something like that. I am slow is really the bottom line. I thought wow that’s average. That’s what other people are doing. And I sat next to you at Wordcamp San Francisco I think it was 2013. And Matt was giving his state of the word address and I thought I’ll live blog it. Which is I submit a sentence like every three minutes or something for the live blog. By the time he had finished you hit publish and you had an amazingly well-crafted thoughtful piece up on Post Status. I was like how do you listen and write and edit and transcribe all that. Hat’s off. You have an amazing brain is…

Brian: Ugh…well writing gets faster with time. So five years of blogging helps and I did polish that up while the QA was going on so I probably had 10 or 15 minutes to make it not suck as much. And you’re very polite to say that it was edited. I was probably fixing typos and adding links most of the afternoon but yet I mean some of the best posts I’ve written have been done in a very short amount of time I did one about WordPress website costs and I decided to start writing that at midnight and published it three in the morning it was like, 3500 words are some like that and it was my most popular post I think I’ve ever written. At least in the short term it got 50,000 or 60,000 views over the course of about a month which was awesome. Yeah I’m mean other times it takes all day to write a post that ends up being totally ignored. So it’s a give-and-take thing.

Carrie: You know that’s very true. I can’t even recall what podcast I was listening to the other day… they were talking Content marketing and how you spend you can spend all this time crafting what you think is the perfect article and it goes over like a fart in church. I mean nobody wants to read it or it’s just not interesting or it doesn’t really get any traction and then another day you just shoot something off-the-cuff it’s almost an afterthought and it resonates somehow. It’s kinda interesting and I guess the point in that is show up and write regardless of whether it feels incredibly inspired or not you never know what’s gonna hit with an audience.

Brian: Absolutely.

Carrie: Jahn had a question. How many people write for Post Status? Are you a solo guy there?

Brian: Pretty much everything on post status was written by me. There are maybe 4 or 5 guest posts on the long form side. In the first iteration of the site it was a lot of link submissions so there’s actually even though notes has only been the newsletter format since January there’s actually an archive of probably a 1000 links over the past two years and probably a third of those were submitted by other people. So let’s say Curtis McHale writes an awesome post. Which he does. Tom McFarlane may submit that to the site and say Y’all should read this. That was how the site used to operate. I put those in the notes format and so they’re not really written by the other people but you know someone can submit stories to me but I’m definitely willing to take on guest posts and he asked if people do it for personal branding. I wouldn’t really guest post for personal branding if I was doing it. I think you have to do that for a really long time before anybody’s really paying too much attention to who the author was. But it is a good way to raise advocacy about something you’re passionate about. And that is usually where my guest posts have come from.

Carrie: Awesome. Well let’s take a little commercial break into a giveaway. We had five awesome giveaways for this show and awesome people that like you that offer to give away their software so I did it via raffle copter. You know conductor plug in was first in the list. Let’s go ahead and give away a copy of that. Excuse me while I am surfing over. The conductor plug and that’s Matt Medeiros and Slocum studio. They even have their own little podcast conductor office hours. Not that they were at all inspired by this office hours. Anyhow it’s a plug-in and that makes it easy to display workers content without any code you can select your layout and drop in your conductor widgets to make displaying your unique content a breeze. So who’s gonna win? Brian do you know how to do a little drumroll in the do hickey – the Google hangout?

Brian: I can do it on my table (drumroll)

Carrie: Do it. Do it. (more drumming) Sorry slow Internet. (laughing) Here we go…quick…quick…
Brian: Longest drumroll.

Carrie: We have Andy Stitt. So Andy…if you’re listening…congratulations! You have just won a copy; like the big daddy copy of the conductor plug in with some add-ons. By the way if your name is hollered out today then I will connect with you after the show. Or connect with me. We’ll find each other. Like running in a field of daisies, we’ll find each other and connect and you can get your prize. So congratulations Andy. And thank you Matt for putting up a copy of conducter plugin. It’s awesome. Okay. Let’s get back and see if we have any questions over @officehoursfm or #officefm

Brian: Speaking of Matt. Madieros-ing me on twitter right now asking a question.

Carrie: You know? He just likes to troll that really is just #Maderios that’s what’s happening right now. We love you Matt. Jahn has another question. You kind of touched on this but how do you know what products or stories to write about? You mentioned some people are alerting you to sort of the news it’s relevant to them how else are you coming across info?

Brian: I’ve been cultivating relationships if you will for a long time. So sometimes I get a sniff of something through a sub tweet it could be something like that. Or sometimes someone comes to me and says they have some news that they can share it for a month, and that kind of stuff. But more than anything I follow a very curated but very significant list of blogs and people. People can’t help but tease the news that they have coming so when they tease it, I usually swipe in and try to figure out what’s going on and determine if it’s valuable for my audience. So between RSS and twitter and tools like that that’s pretty much it. Every now and then I get good stuff through my contact form but a lot more not good stuff through my contact form.

Carrie: I would imagine…like I always think of journalists, which I’m going to call you a journalist being kind of pushy. It’s they don’t take no for an answer there always kind of elbowing to the front to get the news and you pretty much come off as 100% opposite of that. You’re so nice and Alabaman and you just kind of saddle up next to people with your iced tea and say “drop me some news.”

Brian: (chuckles) if we can swap iced tea for coffee or beer that’s fine. I gave up sweet tea when I started drinking alcohol thinking it would be a calorie balance. It didn’t work.

Carrie: Yeah you know I carb load in the form of beer. I just think it’s what athletes are supposed to do. I’m not an athlete but I want to be like one so I am going to carb load with beer.

Brian: Your low carb until beer.

Carrie: Pretty much. I am really high-protein diet and every night I have a couple of beers to just to round it on out. There you go through confessions here on office hours.fm. For any of you folks that are listening live you can send in your questions to Brian all the burning things that you want to know to the twitter handle @officehoursfm or to the #officefm or submit a Google Q&A which speaking of one we have a question from Tom Harriet. He wants to know has the addition of the slack channel for the Post Status club membership decrease the amount of time you spend seeking content since it sort of delivers some stuff your front door.

Brian: No not really. Most of the people that would be able to ping me through the Post Status slack channel and offer something up they’re members so they kind of knew who I was before joining so they had other ways of getting in touch with me. I try to make myself pretty accessible some of my one-to-one conversations have moved to the Post Status slack from other channels like Skype or direct messages on Twitter or maybe the WordPress core slack channel that is another place where you can pretty quickly get somebody one to one. I hadn’t really reduced the friction of finding stuff but sometimes people do share something on slack channel that then I put in to the newsletter and that helps. They get me onto research experiments where I get to go find a bunch more information and share it back. A lot of people are in the slack channel..probably I think it’s a 193 right now out of 260. But that doesn’t mean that everybody can pay attention to it all day. It has been really active so I do take things from the slack channel to notes sometimes coz that’s getting read about 85% of the time…by about 85% of readers.

Carrie: So you said notes is actually a custom post type on your site?

Brian: Yes.

Carrie: What’s your workflow? Do you use Evernote? Do you have kind of workflow for staging that stuff?

Brian: Inspect element (laughing)

Carrie: In chrome? No you’re a chrome user. Right?

Brian: Yeah I am a chrome user. Right now I literally copy the source from the web browser and pop it into the source code on Mailchimp because I’m forcing myself to automate things as I absolutely have to. I’ve actually got the process of generating the newsletter from notes to maybe like a 10 minute thing. So I can definitely save myself time. I have this thing in my head for a WordPress plug-in to siphon from notes, posts, job listings. I’m gonna have a job board things like that. Siphoning them with a one click of a button and it pulls the new ones in the format that will go to the newsletter. I just haven’t done it yet. You know, I gotta make myself automate that type stuff I haven’t gotten to that point.

Carrie: Oh automate #all the things.

Brian: Or nothing.

Carrie: (laughs) Or nothing and just be slow with those repetitive tasks. Yeah I’m always looking at IFTTT or however the heck you say it. If this than that.

Brian: Yep.

Carrie: How to possibly make my life easier but so far I don’t really need to….like it’s got stuff for todoist making it an easier to add a todoist item from your phone. Well how hard is it to click the app icon and the + sign and add one? Do I really need some of these seems like they’re making it a little…you’re creating automation simplicity when it’s already pretty simplistic. But alas. I have a question from Thomas and asking about the hangout link. Thomas I can’t help you out with that right now. But, I will that work for the next airing. My apologies. It is a little difficult to see. We’ve got another question actually two what I think could be trolling questions. We welcome trolls. We welcome everyone here on office hours. Rimcus wants to know when are the WP candy posts gonna be added to post status?

Brian: (dogs barking) I would love to give you an answer on that. I’ve emailed Ryan. I offered my assistance if he was considering bringing the site down and no they are not there yet. But I have writing about WP candy for about two years. That’s probably why he is trolling about that.

Carrie: Awesome. I am just pretty much honored that Rimcus even bothered to tune in to the podcast. I know he’s got important things, he’s got to harvest brussel sprouts and create block press installations I love you Rimcus.

Brian: There is another blog that you may find on post status.

Carrie: What is that?

Brian: Well you know. I can’t say. It has to happen first but it’s on the way.

Carrie: Oh OK. That would be out sniffing out sub context so be on the lookout for that. Gary Jones wants to know when the heck will you get your really simple series plug-in up on Github?

Brian: Gary has asked me this multiple times. Over like a year. I’m a horrible person and haven’t done it. So Gary it is 1:30 if I don’t do it by 5 o’clock my time that’s like probably midnight or something like that. He is in Europe right?

Carrie: Yep.

Brian: Then ugh…punch me in the face.

Carrie: Yeah but I assume this is like emoji delivery because … 

Brian: He can fly over here and actually punch me in the face.

Carrie: All right. Somebody start a kick starter or tilt campaign right now to buy Gary Jones a ticket so that he can come throat punch….or no face punch Krogsgard if it’s not done by 5 PM Eastern standard.

Brian: Central time. That’s an extra hour.

Carrie: OK central time. Extra one. So who let the dogs out? Is a question from Thomas. I just want say WHO? WHO? I just did that and I wish I could rewind 30 seconds. Yeah that’s was bad. Because I didn’t even finish it. If you are going to sing the song then finish it. Krogsgard has dogs and my dogs are tucked away in the backyard so you cannot hear them barking right now. Which leads to a question from Jahn. He wanted to know..where did that question go Jahn? He said your dogs..I don’t know…he asked what other purpose than an awesome people show up as a member directory has have any wants to know why your dogs on it and I’m not. But I’m there. I should be on there. I think I’m on there. I have not frankly looked. But I am a member.

Brian: It’s a separate submission process and if you’ve submitted in the past couple weeks I may or may not have published it yet. It’s a custom post type and the reason it’s there in addition to vanity is because I link profiles to posts or notes about those people so there’s actually…um if you go to someone’s post or someone’s profile you can see posts on Post Status about them and I also have plans to do some other trickery to hopefully pull in other fun data about people. So right now it looks like my pending list is backed up a little bit and Carrie yours is still not on that list.

Carrie: I probably did not submit and I probably didn’t realize that I needed to do that and really even if I did realize I probably would still be too lazy to do it so…yeah…I’ll get on that.

Brian: Perhaps stupid but it’s not connected directly to someone becoming a member. It requires a submission that was hopefully..that was done so that people would fill out the profile with more content and so that I can just review stuff and that’s been one the hardest things is actually staying on top of profiles to make sure that they’re really good because you know your don’t always get the type of stuff you want when people submit. So I have to confirm my links right and make sure the content is nice and curated and there are about 150 on there right now that are published of the 260 members. I’ve got another 20 or so that are pending. I usually just binge and go through a bunch of those, once a week or every two weeks so I have some work on. But the coolest part of that you can’t see yet, which is you’ll see people’s profile you also see organization profiles under posts about them and then when you click on them you see the profile you see the posts that have for written all that kind of good stuff so it’s all interlinked and fun and you just see all it yet but it will be there.

Carrie: Cool. Okay so I do need to get myself submitted and then you need to be writing some articles about that include my name

Brian: Probably about office hours.

Carrie: (laughing) Whoo Hoo! We had a a follow-up question on the really simple shares plug-in…ugh…excuse me….really simple series plug in and for folks aren’t familiar with that can you give the run down.

Brian: Sure. It’s a tiny little plug-in if you don’t do a whole lot of post series but when you do one if it’s just fits perfectly with what you want to do what it does is it converts a category into a series so you would have a category for whatever you are writing about in that series and then it shows them at the bottom of the post in a list others in that series and then when you go to category archive it reverses it so the first one shows up first. That is all it does. And I probably need to work on it but haven’t done much with it since I released it. I don’t know…two years ago. I used it on my personal site little bit and there are other plug-ins that are great for series that are their own taxonomy that I would highly recommend if you plan on doing a lot of them but if you have like one series on your blog and you just want it to have a couple changes then it will work.

Carrie: And that’s what you get for posting a plug-in for the world. People feel like they should be updated. Imagine that.

Brian: Well it should be updated. I need to put some effort into it.

Carrie: Yeah I have got one in the repo that needs some updates. When I say I’ve got one…I mean literally only one in the repo…and it needs an update. One of these days. You know how those to do list go.

Brian: I have only one other plug and that is actually better that I think than really simple series as a utility plug-in that shows a tab called view in the toolbar and then you can instantly go to various custom post type archives and if you toggle back and forth between the dashboard and the front end that one is actually decent plug-in I use it on every site that I own and operate.

Carrie: Nice. Well you mentioned the word utility, which reminded me of a theme that I’m really fond of called Utility Pro.

Brian: Who wrote that?

Carrie: She might be on this podcast right now. Just saying. Today I am also giving away a copy of utility pro the professional license which includes the theme but also the gruntified version of the theme which has really some little builder tools in it as well as like 25 site licenses. So if you want to whip up another one of those amazing drumrolls.

Brian: (drumroll)

Carrie: All right. Kristy Hill. That is Kristy with a K. Congratulations you are now the proud owner of Utility Pro. So congratulations to you Kristy. I will connect with you after the show. That leaves three more amazing prizes to give away and we only have like 20 minutes left so I’ve got to be quicker about this.

Brian: You want to knock another one out?

Carrie: You know what? Let’s do it. Should we make it the Post Status one?

Brian: Let’s do it. (drumroll). My drumroll sucks.

Carrie: I love your drumroll. Ok..and we have…and just forgive me Arlen I am probably not going miss say your last name… Arlen Nagata of Hawaii wp.com. Congratulations. You are winner winner chicken dinner of a post status club membership. One year of amazing emails from Krogsgard in your inbox daily. What?

Brian: Nice.

Carrie: Ok. So that means we’ve got two left. We’ll circle back around to those. One is the design book. Ebook from Rafal Tamal the amazing designer behind Copy Blogger New Rainmaker and Studiopress and then also a Genesis design palette Pro which is from Reactive Studios a.k.a. Norcross which can pretty much rock your world. OK. Rock your world if you’re using a Genesis website. Not like rock your world like an amazing cheesecake could you know. It’s all relative. It’s really relative. Sorry. I should qualify those. Ok let’s see …We got a question from Walter he wants to know Brian how long did it take you to become a WordPress developer and did you use any frameworks…well ok this is two parter…we’ll go with that one first.

Brian: It took I would say two years before a decided it was worth trying to go get a job with WordPress after I got serious about doing it on my spare time. I was traveling a lot for my work so I would get back to the hotel. I would learn WordPress at night. I did that for about two years including writing and building personal websites just goofing around trying to teach myself things and after two years of that I got my first web job. So I wouldn’t say I was any good at that time but I was impactful and good enough to do what I was doing and I learned a lot once I got on board and get better all the time. I don’t think we are ever really done but I tend to think if somebody really goes for it like 10 to 20 hours a week…I think they can prep themselves in about six months from knowing very little about WordPress to being ready to get their first job.

Carrie: Would you recommend any sort of formality in that learning like actually going to a course or something or just sort of I am putting my heads down and going to the Googles. If you don’t know what it is you need to learn it’s kind of hard to know what you need to Google in the first place even though there are a ton of free resources.

Brian: Yeah. Somebody’s been there and done that and they can help you get to where you want to go even if it’s just an itinerary of like learn this and then learn this. Then that’s very helpful. There are resources like that out right now. Brian Richards actually just launched a curriculum for wpsessions that’s supposed to do that and then there are resources like Treehouse and Lynda that are also very good if you want a more organized course. Julie Kuhl was going to do one person for a couple months. That’s another awesome option. Whatever you do; don’t do it completely alone. Either have a mentor or use one of these resources that helps guide you along to learn what you do. Most important just build websites. If your goal for your job is to build websites then just build them while you are learning.

Carrie: Would you say just go build dummy sites or find people who need websites and actually kind of try to start out a little client… ugh..

Brian: Whatever you do I would say don’t do your first ones for money because then there’s going to be expectations. I would say build your own blog first. I don’t care if that’s you know tweaking an existing Genesis child theme or you know forking underscores and doing … just learning CSS and basic things like that. Just do your own blog and then maybe then do a passion site that you have. Like if you are really into Popcorn. Make a popcorn fan site. Then eventually maybe do one or two for your friends and build somebody’s wedding website or something like that or whatever. Gain some confidence before you ask somebody for money to do it. You’re always you know you’re always learning and eventually you do need to charge but I can’t really be the one to advise someone when the right time is. I know my first website was the e-commerce site that I did for $580. My first paid website. I still manage this person’s website amazingly. They have been doing it for probably four years now. It was right when Woo commerce came out actually when woo commerce forked from giga shop. I converted from giga shop to woo commerce. It was probably one of the first woo commerce sites to ever be live. And it is still live.

Carrie: Nice.

Brian: And I charged 580 bucks. That was after about a year and half of doing you know websites on my own.

Carrie: Ok. Why the 580? Why not 550 or 600?

Brian: I have no idea. I make no claim to doing anything the right way…ever.

Carrie: I am not saying it wasn’t the right way. I was just wondered if there wasn’t some interesting strategy behind the 8 – 0 there. I was just curious.

Brian: I have no idea. I think probably based on an estimation of hours I guess. Which was probably horribly wrong.

Carrie: Hey you know what? We all start somewhere. You touched on something that I thought was interesting which is definitely don’t do those first sites when you’re getting your feet wet. Just do them. Don’t try to make money off of them. Do them for the experience. Megan Gray from houseofgrays.com actually she has another url too and I can’t remember it. She wrote an article a while back it was basically if you’re doing pro bono work and she’s very far along in her career but occasionally she has someone that she wants to do some free work for. But she said here the ground rules I use when doing that. So if there’s not a financial transaction then… if somebody wants to Tweet that link out…that would be awesome if you know the article I am talking about. Basically like I have control of creative direction…like what I say is what goes. We’re not going to do a bunch of revisions. It sounds kinda harsh but essentially it’s like if I’m going to be donating my time for something this is not a client relationship where you get to really have input into the process. If we get done with it and you just absolutely hate it then you can chuck it away and hire someone. I thought it was really great advice to use especially when you’re doing free work or starting out and trying to gain clients. The art of development design is one thing the art of dealing with client relationships is a completely other thing so it’s nice kind of not mix the two when you’re first starting out. Just eliminate that that client relationship by saying we’re gonna do it as I want to do it because I am doing it for free. And there you have it.

Brian: I completely agree. I take the same route when I do free work now. One of the worst things you can do is charge a friend a highly discounted fee. I would say do it for nothing or do it for a lot. Don’t give somebody like an 80% discount. I love building free websites because I get to make every decision. I usually take that information back to my audience. Actually now that Post Status is full time that is the only client work I do is when I’m doing it for free or a learning experience. I really don’t like charging people money anymore. If I’m not sure somebody money has to be more money than I could make utilizing that time building the Post Status community.

Carrie: Good advice and thank you to Davinder, Brian and Tom for finding that link. You guys have google skills. Brian, we had a question from Anne and she says there is a coupon code box on the membership section for Post Status and not to put you on the spot but do you think it might be one available for officehoursfm members after the fact. 

Brian: Can you corral 10 people to join at once?

Carrie: I don’t know. That’s going to be according to the twitters. I need to see to the twitters #officehoursfm whether or not you’re interested in that Post Status membership enough to pay for it if there is a discount coupon. Because that is a big thing to ask know. I know when you put time towards your product that’s your baby and the goal is to continue to fund you so that you can continue to put out great information. If you are interested, tweet out and we will see what the interest is.

Brian: I’ve only got one coupon and that’s why that’s there. Just to describe what is. It is for companies or individuals in this case if you’re willing buy 10 or more I will give it to you for $69 and I’ve had a lot of agencies take me up on that where they’ve bought them for their employees. Otherwise I don’t want to devalue the membership for anyone that’s already paid $99 or $365 so that’s why I haven’t offer coupons. I think you’ll get value for $99 though.

Carrie: Awesome. I like that. Not devaluing it. I had somebody ask the other day if I was going to discount the price of my theme. No actually, if anything it will probably go up in time because that’s I really appreciate the people who have supported. The last thing I want to do is come in say thanks for your initial support but if you waited six months here’s the bargain bin. We’re not the Gap. We are software developers. Okay you know what? I think we need to do another giveaway and this time let’s do Rafal Tomal’s book Web Designers Handbook Guide. Are you going to give me another drumroll? I mean you have really been doing an awesome job.

Brian: (drumroll) This has no rhythm. This has the least rhythmic drum roll.

Carrie: Awesome. All right. We have got Leonica. Leonica Mulder. Congratulations. You have won Rafal’s e-book which I don’t know…Brian have you ever gotten to meet Rafal at a Wordcamp or such?

Brian: I have not met him but I’ve admired his work.

Carrie: He’s fantastic and so very not assuming. I got the chance to hang out with him a little bit at the squares conference last weekend and you would never know…I don’t know…I love it when you meet people like that there they are the bomb digity but they don’t even know that the bomb digity and he is that that person. Rafal is awesome guy. He has a ton of wisdom to drop. So Congratulations Leonica. That is yours. Ok. We had a random question the fixed date fields in the background. (erases board) There is no fixed date fields in the background. That was…I am in the process…it’s kind of funny I did not know that you could actually read that…you gotta be careful what’s on there. I’ve been in the process of transitioning the podcast over to a new domain office hours.fm. I was hoping it would be ready today but it is not quite. On my current site had been using advanced custom fields their date time picker to insert those custom date and time for the podcasts and my new site will be under Rainmaker which does not have outside plug-ins. So I am just going purist custom fields and so I had to make a decision whether or not I wanted to keep that UNIX timestamp format on that or do it differently. Because I know you all care, I kept the UNIX timestamp because I want to be able to do fun mathematical things with that.

Brian: You wanted that time to be exact.

Carrie: Exactly. And you know you can’t anything with plaintext. Datatypes for the win. Whish… OK let’s see if we’ve got questions here as we go into the final the segment here. A good question Brian that was a follow-up to our conversation we just got off of. So lets say you do a free website for a buddy or whatnot…How do you…later on how you charge for maintenance if you given that site away for free. Do you have a recommendation there?

Brian: I send them to my good friends at wpsitecare or wpvallet depending on the type of site and how high a scale they really need or if they’ll need further consulting work down the road. Both of those do a really good job for reasonable price and I have I want nothing to do with that.

Carrie: I like your answer. However, what if someone wants to keep that maintenance relationship?

Brian: Ok. If I decide that I will do maintenance. Then if I were doing this new because there are exceptions to every rule because I have managed a few websites for free. If I was doing this new and I was charging for monthly maintenance, I would not charge less than $150 a month and that would include me managing the hosting account for them paying for it and you know making myself available for some period of time per month for when issues arise. So maybe 30 minutes or half an hour or a reasonable amount time without logging it. And then if it gets beyond that or whatever then I reserve my right to either send them on to someone else that can handle the attention that they need or just end the relationship and ask them to look elsewhere. I have never really run into that where people have super high maintenance websites. Sometimes just putting them on a host that can auto update everything for them is enough and you can teach them to tinker. So maybe set them up with toku 101 or something and let him them manage site themselves. That’s what WordPress so good for. I really liked to sit down with my friends and teach them how to use WordPress more than do it all for them.

Carrie: I like that and just as kind of a random follow-up not normally dishing out therapeutic suggestions here on office hours but there’s a book called Boundaries by Henry Cloud and it’s written from…I think he’s a therapist and it’s been a while since I read it but it is a great book on sort of when what’s my problem and what’s your problem…and to that question of maintenance of you know if they have certain expectations what’s your problem and what’s not your problem…having the confidence to say that here’s some suggestions but I’m not beholden to forever and ever to update your website. Amen. Last weeks podcast with Curtis McHale which was pre recorded but go back and listen to that you haven’t found it already. Curtis is great at the boundaries thing. I don’t have that quite down yet. Just a little random aside. Ok. So I’ve gotten twitter notification from Leonica who was actually our first winner to give a little twitter hello today. She already has Rafal’s e-book. So Leonica..let’s just pretend that didn’t happen. Congratulations you are the winner of Genesis design palette pro awesome plug-in for Genesis which lets you change fonts, margins, paddings background colors, all that kind of crap. It’s a huge timesaver. You don’t have to mess with css so let’s….that means we have another another prize. We’re to give away Rafal’s ebook again.

Brian: Again (drumroll)

Carrie: Again. So Frank. I cannot say your last name but you hail from the Netherlands. Rimcus maybe you know Frank. Frank S. Frank S. Congratulations. You have won Rafal’s book and we will be in touch if you so congratulations to those guys that have won and thank you also to Slocum studios, to Reactive Studios to you Brian and to Rafal for giving away those products today. And also officehoursfm is brought to you by Managewp who is just amazing when it comes to a single dashboard for managing all your WordPress sites and also desktop server which is pretty much in the blink of an eye you can set up a local work press install. And oh yeah. They now have an affiliate program. I have been pimping the heck out of desktop server forever not for affiliate purposes just because I really love the product. This week they announced an affiliate program. So check that out if you love them too. Sign up to be an affiliate. And Brian with that we are coming up on the top of the hour. Do you have any massive inspiration, scoop; do you want to give out any scoop that nobody else knows about here on office hours?

Brian: Hmmm did you hear that jet pack is now gonna bundle WordPress as a module?

Carrie: (laughing) you know what? I didn’t really take place in a whole lot of April 1st tomfoolery but that was I think that was probably my favorite article of the day.

Brian: I made my rite of passage by being linked on Matt Mullenweg’s blog with my April fools joke so there’s that. I think I’ve been linked once more before but getting the link on Matt’s blog for an April fool’s joke where I am pretty much making fun of Matt the whole time.

Carrie: That’s awesome. We’ll tweet that out. Just go over to poststatus.com and check out yesterday’s post if you happen to miss that little bit of satire. Brian I really appreciate you taking the time to be on today and just visiting with me. You’re awesome. There is still a whole lot that we didn’t get to talk. Maybe I’ll have the pleasure of getting you on again.

Brian: I’d love to come back. Carrie thanks for doing what you do. Office hours is gonna be a lot of fun and I am putting it in my podcatcher.

Carrie: What? All right cool. Thanks everybody for tuning in and for bearing with us with technical difficulties sometime here soon officehours.fm should look normal and be an actual functional website with full archives of all previous episodes of the podcast and that’s it. Until then next week, next Thursday will be live at 2:00 pm Eastern. Stay tuned for the guest. We may even have more giveaways because boy, I have some generous friends and thank goodness for generous friends. Until then…peace out. Have a great week!