Come Get Nerdy With Us! Episode 61

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Well hello everybody! Welcome to officehoursfm episode # 61.

Kori: Nice.

Carrie: I am your host Carrie Dils and today I am delighted…absolutely delighted to introduce you to 1) the lady that is a bad ass coder…Not that I’m a bad ass coder. I sounded like I just complimented myself. It was meant to be a compliment about you Kori.

Kori: Way to go.
Carrie: Number 2) She is a Word camp organizer; highly engaged in the WordPress community. Number 3) She is fellow Texan, so give it up for Kori Ashton.

Kori: Thank you.
Carrie: Kori…how are you doing today?

Kori: Fantastic. Thanks for having me on your show. You’re incredible. I’ve always just looked at you and thought…Oh to be like Carrie Dils someday. That’s why I follow you and stalk you on Twitter. That’s why I do that.

 

Carrie: I was wondering what this (mimics typing with thumbs).

 

Kori: This is me on Twitter following you.

Carrie: OK. I didn’t know if that was texting while driving but apparently this is stalking.
Kori: No that is not allowed. That is not allowed in San Antonio. You’ve got to put the phone down.
Carrie: Really? I don’t know if they’ve…I know you shouldn’t do it. But I don’t know if it’s actually a law here in Dallas-Fort Worth yet. Maybe we’ll catch on your San Antonio ways.

 

Kori: Yeah. That passed that law here. They put the smack down to. If they catch you, it’s not good.

 

Carrie Wow! Ok well everybody out there.

Kori: Yeah. I was trying to manage one of my WordPress websites…you know…while I’m driving…like updating. It doesn’t work. You can’t do that anymore.

Carrie: That’s seriously hard-core. Now I had a listener…a podcast listener once, who was so determined to tune in live, that she tethered to her phone outside of a Starbucks in the parking lot and was watching it on her iPad. She sent me a little picture of it. We have dedicated officehours listeners.
Kori: That’s loyalty.

Carrie: Yeah. Thank you to everyone who is tuned in today to listen. You can ask questions of Kori by using the #officefm or you can head over to Google+. There’s a community just for officehoursfm. So if you search for that on Google+ it will come up. You can ask questions over there too. Before we get rolling I would like to say a very special thank you to our show sponsors today. We have DreamPress. DreamPress 2. Faster and more powerful managed WordPress hosting. They’re hosted on virtual private servers. DreamPress 2 is super fast, highly reliable, managed WordPress hosting brought to you by the folks over at DreamHost. They’re rolling with all sorts of speed enhancing features, solid state drives, PHP…things…things….all the things that I don’t do because I’m not a server admin they’re doing so that you have to worry about it. And yeah it’s managed by your friends over at DreamHost. One of those friends being Mika Epstein who has been on the show before. So a shout out to them. Learn more over at Dreamhost.com/officehours. And then ManageWP. Kori, are you a ManageWP user?

Kori: No. I’ve come this close. I’m jumping all over that. I’ve heard great things about it. Tell me more.

Carrie: (laughing) Thank you for that. That was like bump, set and I’m coming in for the spike right now.
Kori: Do it!

Carrie: So ManageWP is a single dashboard where you can manage all of your WordPress sites. So like when you’re driving and managing WordPress sites?

Kori: Wow.

 

Carrie: You can do that easier now.

 

Kori: I don’t appreciate you making things that easy though Carrie. That just sounds too simple. I don’t like that.

 

Carrie: Yeah. It’s too simple. You can automate all your backups. You can clone sites and run malware scans and do lots of fun stuff. So if you manage more than one WordPress site that is a very worthwhile investment. You can learn more or even sign up for a free trial at ManageWP.com. All right. So this is episode 61. Kori, it’s my first having you on the show.
Kori: It is.

 

Carrie: I am very happy have you and until the audience gets their coffee rolling and starts submitting questions I’ve just got some of my own. So for people that haven’t had …sorry I’m all over place today…we’ve actually had people request you to be on the show. So you already have a fan base @officehours.

Kori: That’s crazy! It’s so humbling. Thank you.
Carrie: Heck ya! We love everybody @officehours. Well…maybe not everybody but you.

Kori: Good call.

 

Carrie: So for people who haven’t met you yet, give us the rundown. Who is Kori Ashton and what do you do?

 

Kori: Goodness. Well I live in San Antonio Texas. I run a small team down here. There is about 10 of us now. We’re growing. But a small group down here and we are completely niched in WordPress. That’s what I do full-time, I nerd out on WordPress stuff. We’re doing everything from developing from scratch themes for folks to doing you know custom solutions and really fancy cool stuff with WordPress. And then we also do just do total simple you flipping a theme for mom-and-pop shop that might not have a really robust budget. We’re going to help them out. And then I don’t know if it’s because of our location which I’m sorry if I’m going to offend somebody but we literally are between a Titty Bar and a Chinese Restaurant. All right. That’s where we are. I don’t know if it’s because of our location or what but that’s probably the first time on your show you had a Titty Bar mentioned. We’re right down the middle of it.
Carrie: You might as well go for the third time. If you’re going to do it…let’s go big.

 

Kori: (laughing) Very cool. Well we’re in the Medical Center of San Antonio. So we’re kind of really in a unique spot. Actually our claim to fame is that were above a Starbucks. Which we are. We cover the full length of a Starbucks. So sit on top of it. It’s kind of cool but I don’t know if it’s because of our location or not, we really do get a lot of mom-and-pop shops and young entrepreneurs that don’t have much of a budget. So we try to help them out and find something that we can provide them the right resources and not leave them hanging just because they don’t have a big budget for getting their website presence started. Right? So we decided to start doing weekend workshops where people can come in for 500 bucks. We’re going walk them through what it looks like to install WordPress, to choose a good theme for them to help them understand what plug-ins are and how widgets work and literally in two days we’re able to help folks get live online with a great responsive WordPress website. We’re doing that partially obviously to help entrepreneurs but also to give back to the WordPress community because we need more and more people on WordPress and educated on how to use WordPress, right?

Carrie: Preach.
Kori: So that’s our… preach…go. (laughing) And we’re also showing some love here through the WordPress community with our Meetup Groups and we’re pretty active there. We have a lot of fun doing a lot of freebee give back projects.That’s what I do…what’s that?

 

Carrie: When you sleep? Or do you?

Kori: You know what? I’m very blessed to say that because my team is so incredible, we get a lot accomplished. I feel like I actually don’t work that much. It’s pretty amazing. I mean my family might not agree with that. They feel they don’t see me very often but you know…yeah…yeah…I have a great team.
Carrie: If any of them are tuning in either actually via his hang out or they may be just watching you over on Periscope.

 

Kori: Oh. Good Call.

Carrie: Can you see how many people are checking? Fyi for our listeners right now, Kori is livestreaming this on is on Periscope which…Periscoping is a thing. I didn’t even know until today that it was a thing. It’s kind of chat roulette meets selfie…video selfie. And yeah…Kori is

 

Kori: Let’s see if I can get back over here. I didn’t want to distract from your podcast obviously here at all. So I kind of put it on mute for second and so our crowd has dwindled. But for those of you who don’t know what it is you need to be checking out what Periscope is. It’s kind of creepy cool.

 

Carrie: Well, all right. It sounds like something to do if you’re kind of bored or maybe there’s nothing good on the tube. In terms of watching Periscope.

 

Kori: So remember the Truman Show? Remember that movie with Jim Carrey?
Carrie: Oh yes, yes, yes.

 

Kori: That’s what this kind of reminds me of. Even though most people know that they’re being watched you know? Because they’re sharing the podcast…or the broadcast rather? So most people know but… here I’ll flip the  the camera back around so they can see. So now you’re being watched on my Periscope. So there you go and now you can see behind-the-scenes we are hanging out with Carrie Dils who’s up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas. I’m down in San Antonio and we are my live streaming on Google Hangouts as well as Periscope.
Carrie: There’s so much technology happening right now. I don’t even know if my mind can contain it all.

Kori: (laughing) You know it’s job security for us that there’s always some new different network…social network that’s popping up…or something new trending you know with SEO… or something new happening with WordPress. It’s job security but at the same time it’s a total brain cramp for me to keep up with.

Carrie: Well you’re ahead of the class to even know what it is and already be using it. So there you go.

 

Kori: You’ve got hearts flying right there. Heart’s flying just for you. Right there.

 

Carrie: Yes! Heart’s flying. You get a +1 for saying creepy cool from Deborah who’s tuning in right now. Your description of WebTegrity brought up a couple more questions for me. 1) Do you have street presence? Do you have your signage or windows like when people walk by do they know it’s there and they just kind of walk in? Or…

 

Kori: Yeah. We have had walk-ins before. Up above Starbucks we do have one really large window that we have. It just says web design in it with our phone number. And it just has our WebTegrity W there. We knew that people wouldn’t know what WebTegrity was yet so we didn’t really want to broadcast our name. We wanted to broadcast what we do, right?
Carrie: Cool. Very cool. Ok. My next question is you said you do mom-and-pop…you serve a range of clients. Can you give a budget range of the projects that you might typically work on?

 

Kori: Oh sure. So we do a little bit of everything. When my dad actually started this company in 1997, the year before Google existed he started building websites. And you know, he started out like most freelancers at that point where he was like stoked for a $500 gig, right? Whoo! Thankfully, I kind of came along and was like dad we can do this. We can do this. I know we can make this business work so let’s figure how to make this happen. Basically what we did was get a brick-and-mortar and get it started, right? So our prices obviously went up to cover our costs and our expenses there and bring on a little bit of a team. We’re very transparent with our pricing. We charge by the hour of whatever the project is going to take. So we have our prices listed on our Website. Typically for doing…flipping a theme for a person…and we’re doing something like a 5 to 8 page website…you’re probably be around that the $2,800 to $3,200 range. But most of our projects probably average around the $7,000-$10,000 range because we really focus on doing custom. We love to build from scratch because it’s lightweight fast. It’s exactly what the client needs and there’s no extra excess weight you know? Or complications in the code.
Carrie: Oh well that ties in perfectly with two questions we’ve got sitting in the docs right now. One from Jackie and she wants to know how quickly you can build out those mom-and-pop shops…ugh websites.

 

Kori: Sure. Interestingly enough most of time were chasing the client. It’s the client that slows us down. Most freelancers are going to say Amen to that. Because we are…you know you end up chasing a client because they’re struggling to write about us information. Typically a project for us like that would run about three week turnaround time but unfortunately if we have to chase a client for their about us information or for some photos it might stretch a little bit but we’re trying not to go ever past a five week turnaround.

 

Carrie: (Video is breaking up )The theme structured in a way like the project manager?

 

Kori: Yeah. Sorry. You are cutting in and out a little bit Carrie. Uh oh. You’re frozen…Oh no! There you are. Now I can hear you.

 

Carrie: Oh. OK. Sorry. I told you before we started there would be a technological mishap during the show. It just happens. I don’t know…I attract technology problems. I was asking about the structure of your team and you know do you typically have multiple people assigned to a project and what are those roles…if you could talk about that for a sec.

 

Kori: So I am pretty much the lead when we get a request or quotes come through or we get a phone call. We’ve gotten some crazy leads recently off of our Youtube channel. People are loving us over there so were getting inundated kind of by a couple of different ways right now or requests for quotes. I am the initial point of contact so I’m going to go ahead and meet with the client and try to figure out what their marketing needs are all the way around. I will divvy up once the contract lands…I’ll divvy up the tasks with whoever my team is first of all available and second of all obviously capable of tackling whatever tasks I’m assigning to them. So we’ve got folks here who are from scratch lead developers that can literally code you name it in their sleep and they’re figuring it out and they’re coding it. We’ve got some of our graduates from our classes that we’ve hired on and they are now freelancers for us and they work here in house that are able to…
Carrie: Awesome.

 

Kori: I know! It’s really cool. It’s cool Carrie. They pay to come to our classes and then we hire them. I mean it’s the perfect thing because they have already learned our system they’ve already learned the best practices that we teach, they understand our culture they actually take the class here in our office space. They are able to see the environment and meet the team. It’s a really great dynamic. So we have hired on about four of our graduates right now and so those are kind of newbies so we typically hand them just customizing an existing theme. Then we’ve got content suffers and then my dad who is 71 years old is still part of this company and he’s typically our guy who migrates the sites life.

 

Carrie: All right. Nice. A family affair.

 

Kori: Totally. My mom is our accountant so if you’re looking to pay your invoice, you’re gonna call up and talk to Joy. And my dad is the guy who’s either going to give you email support or migrate your database.
Carrie Nice. Very cool. Well…so speaking of these developers that can just crank out things….custom builds…do you have …are you using any sort of theme framework or is it something that you rolled yourself internally…what are you building on?

 

Kori: Am I allowed to say anything other than Genesis right now? I don’t know.

 

Carrie: It’s not Genesis office hours it’s just officehours.

 

Kori: Ok. No. You know what? Most of my team that have come in…we code from scratch obviously. What we’ve done is we’ve created kind of a skeleton theme that we’ll run with. That’s our Webtegrity kind of skeleton theme. From there it has all of our core files, everything that we need…our core CSS file…all that fun stuff…and we build out from there. Yep.

 

Carrie: Not everyone has to use Genesis. So you are still welcomed and loved here. What’s that?

Kori: You didn’t disconnect me. This is good. We’re still live….agh…it paused again. Come back…

 

Carrie: Oh did it…I’m here.

 

Kori: I’m here.
Carrie: (laughing) Ok. That’s too bad because I was making a funny joke about the WiFi cutting out and you not being to come back.

 

Kori: Ah…I see how it is. Yeah exactly. Then it does…yeah…I see.

 

Carrie: You’ve got a good little…I shouldn’t use the word little…You’ve got a good system…so for managing projects, you’ve got clients walking in the door…you have employees literally walking in your door (cuts out) succeed…you guys have been there for a long time. You’re also…you were noted as one of the women business owners to watch out for recently in San Antonio. So are you like the San Antonio rep for women in tech?

 

Kori: Well for WordPress women in tech I would be extremely honored to hold that title. Absolutely . There are some really incredible ladies here in San Antonio that have not only been highlighted in that same article but that are just coming out of the woodwork now that I wasn’t even aware of. Just some phenomenal women here in San Antonio that are really freakishly smart when it comes to technology and I’m very humbled to even be mentioned in the same conversation with them because I am truly self-taught when it comes to all this stuff. I did go to college. I went to college for marketing and had a blast doing stuff like that but when it comes down to nerd code and knowing HTML, CSS and PHP it is…I mean my dad literally in 1990…I started coding and ’98…he opened up a Netscape Navigator Browser if we remember that far back…

 

Carrie: Oh yeah.
Kori: It had internal editor inside of it and that’s how I initially started coding. We didn’t have Dreamweaver back then. I didn’t even know what CSS was back then. I started coding that way. I’m very humbled by all these women who come in with their doctorate degrees and they’re freakishly smart and they’re engineers and all this other stuff. I’m blown away by it. I would be so proud to represent for WordPress in San Antonio. Heck Yeah.

Carrie: Sweet. Well you guys held your first ever WordCamp earlier this year. And you spearheaded that, if I remember correctly?

Kori: I did! I was very honored again to be a part of a great team that came together out of our local Meetup group. A bunch of volunteers just kind stepped up and said you guys we keep traveling to Austin and to Dallas…and we’re going everywhere else. We’re flying over to San Francisco were going everywhere else for WordCamp. Why isn’t San Antonio having our own? So a couple of us just got enough moxie up and we said let’s do it. Let’s figure this thing out. We pulled it together. Talked to WordCamp central and asked those crazy cool chicks over there hey how we do this thing? They walked us through it…provided us amazing resources. Carrie, we even landed a venue that did a trade for a WordPress website.

 

Carrie: Oh my gosh! That’s perfect.

 

Kori: Heck Yeah. They didn’t have to pay for it. The totally said you know what? Our website sucks. If you guys are nerds…let’s do a trade in value. Bring it on! Let’s do it.

Carrie: That’s awesome.
Kori: Yeah. There was a great turnout too.

 

Carrie: I went out again?

 

Kori: No you’re good. I said it was a great turn out.

 

Carrie: Ok. I just heard out…and thought I cut out . Yeah. Well we’ve got WordCamp DFW is coming up this fall…September 12th. So we would love to have you mosey up I 35 and come hang out with us up here.

 

Kori: Fantastic.

 

Carrie: So it sounds like you have a very strong active WordPress community. I’ve had some of the listeners to the show say they don’t have really any sort of local community. They will travel for a WordCamp. There’s no Meetup in their area. Do you have a suggestion or…should they just go start a Meetup? What would you say to those folks?

 

Kori: Well…you know…it is frustrating. We’re a pretty large city and there are a lot of firms here in town who make their living using WordPress. When it comes down to those free classes and it comes down to stepping up and organizing something and donating your time and your energy to something beyond the 9-to-5 job that you’re doing…it is few and far between… very rare to find somebody who’s 1) going to step up in the first place and 2) ultimately be consistent with it, right ? If there’s no profit margin in it for them. So it’s taken a lot and there’s a guy here in San Antonio…Usef Chatteri…I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to him because truly he is the guy who has kept it running here in town. He was already plowing ahead…he holds…Carrie…get this…almost every day of the week he’s holding something for free…somewhere.

 

Carrie: Wow!
Kori: And it’s at different venues around town to bring them traffic. It’s always for free. He’s just constantly giving back and so our team has stepped up and said hey can we do maybe one a month and try to catch up with you? Or stay running alongside of you. He’s just constantly on the go. There’s always something happening here but for those that don’t have anything…I would absolutely say start small. Start meeting at a local Starbucks or something. Just start. You can contact WordCamp Central and ask them what it looks like to do a Meetup group and they can they help you out with setting up the Meetup account. Walk you through all that so that you have an official Meetup account and not just something that you’re having to pay to run. Start with total beginners. If you think will maybe I don’t know everything and I can’t teach all that you know more intense stuff . It’s ok. Because I promise you there’s somebody local in your area that doesn’t know as much as you know. You’re going to be able to help them. Then the next thing you know, you’re going to be able to network and there is going to be somebody who comes on board with your with your little group that is more advanced than you. You’re just going to start to nurture it and grow a grassroots effort. Giving back to WordPress…is what…that’s the core WordPress community.
Carrie: Uh oh. It looks like I’ve lost you for a second. There you are. Unfrozen. (laughing) I love what you said. Whatever you know something about WordPress they don’t know yet. Definitely jump in and start small. I love that you mentioned WordCamp Central because they start up Meetups. You know…even funding if you can’t find a space that will host you for free or what not. Yeah. Cool stuff. So switching gears a little bit, Jackie wants to know what advice would you give to someone starting their design or development consulting business to with connect clients who are the right fit?

 

Kori: Connect with clients that are the right fit?
Carrie: Sorry. To find clients that are the right fit. Also to attract clients that are going to be a good fit for your business.
Kori: Sure. So I love that you’re already thinking that way, first of all Jackie because most people who are hungry just starting out say…I just want anything and everything…bring it on. Bring it on, right? No. I’m thankful that you’re already gearing your mind to how can I find the right people that fit for me? To be able to help with my skill set, right? That’s brilliant. But what I would say is a pretty cool way to that and the way we basically started was literally starting out to grow your portfolio sometimes you ‘re going to have to do some freebies. But I would say challenge yourself to be gutsy enough to go after a larger fish for a freebie. All right? Somebody that would hold a little bit of wow you did that account? Cool. You know give you a little bit of a feather in your hat for your portfolio. Start growing it that way. Do a couple of freebies. Grow your portfolio and then be able to start presenting to the right type of clients that fall hopefully in that same pattern. If you already have stellar portfolio and you’re just like…nah… I just need better clients…dang it. We started doing a lot of networking with local events that were going on, specifically for the types of clients we were looking for, right? We started holding specific events as well that were totally free to attract the right type of clientele. I’ll give you quick for instance. Somebody can steal this idea. I don’t care.  It will ultimately help WordPress. Who cares?

 

Carrie: Bring it.
Kori: Bring it on. So about once a quarter, we hold an SEO event. Now in San Antonio, WordPress is just starting to really build some momentum here so we know that SEO is more of a buzzword. We don’t want to just limit people who are on WordPress to come to this event. So we really hold it under the umbrella of this is going to be an SEO seminar. It’s a four hour seminar. Shoot me now….you’re thinking. Good Lord. Sitting there for four hours. All right. But we hold it at Alamo Draft House and everybody gets free food. It’s a really cool vibe and it’s like $30 bucks and it covers all our expense to hold that event, right? We’re able to teach at that point and show people our hearts first of all, our caring nature of being able to give back. We’re not just smoke and bells…we’re going to be very transparent and we’re going to help you with your SEO and let’s get you onto WordPress. Let’s convert you. Let’s bring you over to our side. We throw that in there always. But I tell you what that does. We hold those events on Thursdays which is a work day. We hold those events during business hour 11 to 2 typically and we do it…(that’s only three hours)…10 to 2 (giggling) and we do it that way because we want the type of client that we want…we want a medium-sized company that has a marketing director that can send somebody to that meeting while they are on the clock. We don’t necessarily…our ideal perfect client is not necessarily a mom-and-pop shop starting out and has a $1500 in their budget, right? That’s not what we want. We’ll help those people but our ideal client like the way you’re kind of discussing…you kind of have to come up with a game plan like that and kind of tackle it that way.

 

Carrie: That’s a really interesting…I’ve never heard the advice to…now I’ve heard the advice of taking on some freebies just to get your portfolio rolling…but what you’re saying is go after the kind of client you want and offer up a free site to get that in the portfolio. That’s very interesting.
Kori: It works. Doing these meetup groups unfortunately attracts a lot of DIYers and they’re not looking to spend a lot of money. I don’t dedicate my time with Meetup thinking I’m gonna land a $15,000 project. That’s not at all why I do that. I do that to give back to WordPress. I hold these major events to go after the $15,000, $20,000 $30,000 contracts, right? Heck yeah.
Carrie: There you go. Well great thorough answer there. Hopefully Jackie that gave you some good food for thought. All right. We’re coming up on the halfway. Can you believe you already spent 30 minutes jabbering with me on line? And Periscoping.

 

Kori: I’m a Texan. I can talk. We’re good.
Carrie: Shoot. We’ve got this all day long. So last week I had an Alabama girl on.

 

Kori: Oh Lord.

 

Carrie: Yep. I had Rachel Carden. She’s a big Alabama fan so she gave us Roll Tide and some interesting Alabama-isms. Are you…this has nothing to do with WordPress…are you much of a…are you like a San Antonio Spurs fan? Or could you give two flips about them?

Kori: I could give two flips about San Antonio Spurs and I’m probably going to have some serious backlash from that. Ugh…I probably just lost like 5 clients.

 

Carrie: You know what? All of our viewers dropped off.

Kori: (laughing) I’ve got something for you here though. Hold on…speaking of that…let me show you something…hang on…hang on…(Rachel gets up and walks away from camera).

 

Carrie: Oh wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest get up and leave during the show.
Kori: This is so worth it. (holds up a photo) This is Spurs Jesus. Can you see this?

 

Carrie: (laughing) Wow! Ok. I’ll let you…

 

Kori: Seriously. That’s Spurs Jesus right there. (puts picture up to camera) You can see it a little bit clearer there. It’s something real. This guy shows up to Spurs events. This is not just a post card. Yeah literally. The back side says Spurs Jesus on it. It’s ridiculous. So that’s how dedicated San Antonians are. They light candles. It’s a serious, serious religion down here.

 

Carrie: Wow. While we’re hanging out on a spiritual note and basketball…I’ll share something completely funny and unrelated. I’m from Houston originally. You know home of the Houston Rockets and we won back to back championships …I think it was ’93…’94…’95. Somewhere in there. “We believe“ was sort of the slogan.

Kori: Ok.

Carrie: And everybody was wearing the Rocket t-shirts that said “We Believe”. There were billboards that said “We Believe”. And then people even had like these little posters in their car…”We Believe”. All over town. I had a friend come and visit me she was like…is there like a big revival going on in town? I was like what? She goes …video breaks up…fans do as they will.

Kori: Oh my word. I love it.
Carrie: Ok. So I did not know that I could pull out that story today. It’s never quite fit into the flow before. So thank you Kori for that. (laughing) So you have an interesting situation in that you’re very education oriented. You are providing a lot of resources at that DIY level and for the mom-and-pops that necessarily don’t have the budgets to spend. So you’re using…to me it sounds like you’re doing those things because and that’s your way of contributing back. But at the end of day…you know your bread and butter is going to be going after these larger contracts.

 

Kori: Sure.

Carrie: Have you ever had the quandary of…do we say no the $3,000 project and refer it out to another firm or it a resource drag to take on projects of that size or…what’s the story?

 

Kori: Yeah. So…um…obviously it would cross your mind where’s our best ROI? How do we spend our time wisely, right? Especially as we are kind of a smaller team and I have to wear a lot of hats and be pulled into ten different directions…but I will tell you this…that again I’m surrounded by such a great team here that they work for it. They are just like don’t pass up anything Kori. Send me work. Send me work. So they are always hungry for more. Especially new graduates of our program that come out of  our WordPress advanced track. They just graduated having taken a 14 week course where they have now learned how to code from scratch and they’re hungry for work. So if we can pass along to them a smaller project where we can give that client…they are still going to be able to get a great product and the student is making back some tuition that they just paid. It’ a win – win situation.
Carrie That’s awesome!

 

Kori: Heck yeah.
Carrie: You created this whole eco system. I like it.
Kori: It is pretty cool. It’s just really happened…kind pivoting our company that way in the last year where we have really dedicated our time to setting up the full course that we have now. Because in the last three or four years we’ve just been doing a lot of one on one classes. If a client needs some training on what is Facebook versus Twitter…we’ll bring them in, sit them down and walk them through just a one on one training session. We’ve done that from the beginning of time. What we saw was that people 1) don’t have the money to spend $99.00 an hour to sit down and really learn everything that they needed to learn. So we thought Ok, how can we cut the cost, group people together and still make it profitable for us, right? So it works. I really actually enjoy teaching, Carrie more than I enjoy nerd coding for that matter. Another way that we’re giving back too is we do WordPress Wednesdays here. I mentioned earlier our YouTube channel…literally every single Wednesday we’re releasing a WordPress video on how to do something with WordPress. We’re just now finishing up a series on Yoast. We did four videos where we talk you through how to install it, how to optimize it, how do go do a key word research so you even know key words to be using and how to submit your site map. We love doing those. That’s actually been generating the right type of clients for us too believe it or not.

 

Carrie: Interesting. Because the people watching those videos are probably not your clients…I’m guessing…or your potential clients.

Kori: You know, it’s interesting though. Some have come through and it’s interesting….think about this Carrie. If I got hired on as a marketing director and I’ve been handed this WordPress web site and I don’t want to tell my boss that I don’t have a fricking clue what I’m doing I’m going to jump on YouTube. I am going to sit there and I am going to hammer out some questions and try to figure out and watch some tutorial videos and them I’m going to figure out I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing and that girl makes it sound easy. I’m going to hire her. That’s what we’re seeing happen.

 

Carrie: Wow. Interesting. That’s awesome! Ok so you’ve got fingers in all sorts of pies. Once again, I don’t know when you’re sleeping.

Kori: (laughing) I’d rather be busy than bored any day of the week. So bring it on.

Carrie: All right. Do you find that doing the YouTube stuff is good for generating organic traffic?
Kori: Hands down. I had no clue.
Carrie: I should clarify. Back to your site traffic.

 

Kori: Yeah. Yeah absolutely. I understand what you’re saying. I actually had no clue that it would generate what it has. But one of the things that has been just tremendously blowing us up over there is they actually have a gal…this is so interesting Carrie…we did the WordCamp here. Whenever you hold a WordCamp, you’re supposed to videotape it, right? And all the different speakers. WordCamp Central actually sends you all the video equipment, right? You know this. You facilitated the WordCamp up there. They send you all the equipment. We recorded everything and you submit back to WordCamp your video of what you talked on. They have this crazy cool gal over there…one of… I’m sure… that does closed captioning for them… for all their videos.
Carrie: Wow. That’s awesome.

Kori: Yeah. She volunteers. She happened to be the closed captioner for my video. She reached out to me. She said Kori, I’m just learning really how to do closed captioning and I’m just learning what WordPress is. So I’m thinking to myself a way to give back to WordPress is to keep volunteering on doing closed captioning for WordPress stuff and I’ll learn as I type. So Carrie…she asks me…

 

Carrie: Freaking brilliant.

 

Kori: I know right? She asks me can I start doing all your closed captioning for your WordPress Wednesday videos? Like she asked me that! What? Yes please. So adding in the closed captioning for all my videos has just blown up our analytics now because YouTube is able to offer so much more now. Not only for those that are hearing impaired but also for translating right? So we’ve got people watching us from all over the world and coming to our web site off of YouTube. Yeah.

Carrie: That is awesome. And three cheers for accessibility.
Kori: Yes. Heck yeah.

Carrie: I’ve started doing…it’s never occurred to me to close caption because all of these episodes end up on YouTube…since they’re Google Hang Outs. I have an archive out on officehoursfm too but you can get to them through YouTube. I’ve hired someone to start doing episode transcripts for me. But it never occurred to me to throw them…I wonder if I could repurpose those as closed caption…maybe.
Kori: Absolutely you can. That’s actually what this lady does for us. Her name is Mali and she lives in Georgia. It’s just crazy. She says to me….we’ve never met. We’ve only Skyped…after all this. She says to me…I’ll tell you what I’m going to do….I’m going to do your closed captioning. I’m going to commit to doing things for a couple of months for you and I’m going to send you the transcript. We’ve taken this transcript. We’ve thrown it on our website and she’s doing the closed captioning. It’s amazing!

 

Carrie: Yeah. She sounds awesome. I wonder if there’s software to kind of aid that process…of closed captioning.

 

Kori: You know what? She did mention to me that she was using something. I can’t for the life of me, remember what it was.

 

Carrie: Well we will find that out. I mean it’s not really pertinent I guess.
Kori: We could Google it. I will find out and I will Tweet it out. How about I will do that?

Carrie: Perfect. Hit some #officefm with that tasty tidbit. We had a lovely comment from Ginger. She says I want your Yoast class. It’s a great show today. You have great energy Kori.

Kori: Ah…thank you.
Carrie: Thank you for being a little afternoon caffeine bump.

Kori: Yeah there you go. Well there’s nothing more boring than watching somebody with a tutorial that just sits there or doesn’t have the camera and they’re monotone. I mean shoot me now. That’s miserable. So if you know any Texans you know that we’re pretty animated anyway. Right Carrie?

 

Carrie: Ah Giddy up baby! I mean yeah. You know those people that you just described do not have a career in Periscoping.

 

Kori: No. Good call.
Carrie: They’re going to need to look elsewhere for their life’s work. We have a question. What types of sites are you building in WordPress that we might not expect to find being based on WordPress?

 

Kori: That’s a pretty cool question. A lot of our projects are kind of the general…corporate looking blog you know that they use for  their press releases type website. Let’s see. I’ve got a whole board up here of current projects right now. We just built a really cool one based on an app. We are getting ready to launch it soon. That’s going to have some cool API nerdy stuff behind it there.
Carrie: Nice.
Kori: Yeah. That’s pretty cool. We just had a movie producer out of Austin contact us and ask if we would be open to doing some really cool interactive stuff. So I’m stoked about that because very typically…nine times out of ten….we’re going to get the consulting company, or a counselor, or a lawyer…and I’ll do those websites all day long. We try to keep them as interesting as possible and give them personality and talk about SEO and content strategy and conversion strategy and …blah…blah…blah. But the cool ones that pop up you know we launched Alamo City Comic Con .
Carrie: Whoo Hoo!

 

Kori: It looks pretty darn cool. We were stoked to do that project. We launched them not too long ago. They’ve got a really cool countdown that goes down and tells you how many days you have until the event takes place. That was a fun project. We also…probably one of our largest projects that we’ve ever built on WordPress is the Animal Defense League here in town. There’s a lot of customization behind it. It has some really cool bells and whistles in there where you can go on and adopt a pet, or at least apply to adopt a pet. They’ve got some really cool caching stuff going on where as soon as a pet is adopted they can log in and behind the scenes and check – adopted and then a little adopted badge kind of pops up over the cute little dog’s face or cat’s face. That stays there for three days and then dynamically it takes that post and sets it back to draft mode and pulls it off the web site. So some fun stuff like that we do.
Carrie: Very cool. On the one that you mentioned that you’re doing the app with, is the app basically the mobile version of the site or are there two separate components there?

 

Kori: It is the mobile version of the site. Way to go! I would probably have to pull in our lead developer to give you all the crazy technical stuff because my technical speak would max out at probably what we just said. (chuckles)

Carrie: I will not ask you any more in depth questions because I don’t have the technical vocabulary to ask them…so.
Kori: Brilliant! Brilliant fit here. This is good.

Carrie: Comic Con. Are you…as part of the project…did you get free tickets?

Kori: Hands down. You know me. That’s the way I roll. I am all about doing free crap for trade or something like that Carrie. I have a great story for you, speaking of that one.
Carrie: Bring it.

Kori: Ok. So don’t you love your job? Do you love what you do?

Carrie: Absolutely.
Kori: Ah. I love what I do. I’m so blessed to be such a stupid nerd and do stuff like this every single day. I love it! So I never know who’s going to walk through my door, what potential new client, random lead is going to come through my inbox for the day, right? I never know. The other day I had this guy walk in. He’s this quirky looking bird. Really unique looking. I actually couldn’t take my eyes off him. He’s so unique looking. He comes in. I come to find out he’s like a dentist, right? So he goes Kori, I have three projects for you. I said ok bring it on. The first one is a forum. I said ok awesome. The next one is just a regular WooCommerce site. I said oh ok. That sounds good. One hour we spend walking through his two projects. I am thinking we can build this all day long. No big deal. He’s got a good personality but he’s just kind of serious. He’s a doctor…he’s kind of serious. And then it comes down to…he goes do you want to know what the third project is? I said sure. Bring it on. What else you got? He goes all right type this into the screen there and let’s pull it up and take a look at it. I said ok. We go to typing and he goes shreddiesusa.com.
Carrie: Wait. Is that the under wear thing? (laughing)

Kori: Yes! Yes. How do you know about that? Carrie…

 

Carrie: I don’t know. Maybe I should be embarrassed to say that I even knew about it. But, go ahead. Carry on. Describe shreddies.
Kori: So if anybody’s watching this and you just went and Googled that…first of all I hope that the first picture does not royally offend you because it is a gal in her skivvies and it is a dude kneeling down sniffing her tush. And so what it actually is…I never heard of this before is flatulent filtering underwear.

Carrie: I just…I don’t know…I need to see some testimonials from actual humans.
Kori: There are. Good call. You believe everything you read online. They’re on Amazon. Come on!
Carrie: Wow. Ok. Well I might need to buy a three pack for my husband.

Kori: Well there you go. Do what you got’s to do. My mom said we’ll do a trade of services for my husband. That’s what my mom said. Let’s hook him up with a seven pack.
Carrie: To be fair I might use a pair or two. You never know.

Kori: Well the technology behind it is brilliant. They’ve taken a Hazmat suit that’s normally lined with charcoal as it’s filter. They’ve basically reversed the technology from anything being able to seep in…they reversed it so that stuff cannot seep out. You’ve got chemically sealed in drawers. That’s what you’ve got. I complete digressed on our conversation here. We’ve probably lost every viewer possibly. I apologize for that. But my point to that whole story was that I never know what we are going to be building for. I love the opportunity to help different companies. I have traded services for a new roof on my house, for a kayak, for landscape, for tacos, for burgers and now for underwear.

 

Carrie: Ok. So what did you do for Shreddies?
Kori: Right now…if you go on their website…right now the button that you click to buy now actually unfortunately takes you out to his Amazon cart. And Amazon is taking their 25%. He doesn’t want to do that anymore. He’s been able to reassess his marketing strategy and bring fulfillment in house. He’s going to actually going to be wanting to sell directly on his WooCommerce site. I’m going to switch those around and be sure that everything is set up for this WooCommerce cart to launch. We’re going to do some SEO work for him.
Carrie: Oops. Sorry. I was still muted. It was kind of a double entendre of what did you do for Shreddies? (Both laughing) Thanks people. I will be here all week.

 

Kori: Fair enough.

Carrie: Getting back to the topic of WordPress, which by the way thank you for that. I have a feeling ratings for this episode might skyrocket from the Shreddies mention there.

Kori: From the Shredddies to the Titty bar and then leaving the screen. Look out! I am the best guest you’ve ever had. My bad.

Carrie: And Periscoping! We’re crushing it today. Ok. So Davinder wants to know do you have any specific plugins or tools that you’re using in house for implementing some of these more complex projects. Are you using advanced custom fields or custom meta boxes or just again…things you roll in yourself?

Kori: Yeah, absolutely. Advanced custom fields…we’re all over that. We also have switched gears to just like Cowboy coding or doing something with Wamp or Mamp and we’re using Cloud9 now. Our team seems to really love that. Our in house developers here are all over that. They’ve been using that more. Some of this stuff…you can actually get away with dynamically doing things through Gravity Forms. That is a seriously robust plugin. So we’ve been using that. That’s probably…advanced custom fields and a lot of custom coding. Our team just does a lot from scratch that we know what we’re doing. We know that’s it lightweight and we know it’s compatible with everything that we’re using.
Carrie: Nice. Custom Post types.
Kori: Yeah. Great questions though.
Carrie: I’ve got awesome listeners. But you already knew that.
Kori: It’s pretty impressive. I was wondering how you were going to come up with all these questions yourself. I’m glad people are stepping up for you. This is good.
Carrie: Huge. Yeah they keep me on point. We were talking about underwear and then Davinder tried to get us back on track with an actual WordPress question. So…yeah.
Kori: Thank you. Bring us back. Focus.

Carrie: Well you know what Kori? While everyone is in such a good mood and loving this, I’m just going to go ahead and blatantly ask that if you love listening to this show that you head over to iTunes and just leave a killer review. That would be greatly appreciated. Not just you. It helps us find more listeners who want to hear more about underwear or possibly really cool topics. Oh Goodness.
Kori: Did you see the shout out over on Twitter?

 

Carrie: What’s that?
Kori: Did you see the shout out over on Twitter that Ginger just sent you? This is good stuff, right there. Carrie knows all the underwear things. I’m picturing the little you know all the things graphic?
Kori: All the things.

Carrie: There you go. I’ve thought a lot about the legacy I’m going to leave Kori. I’m glad that underwear knowledge has made the cut on the show.
Kori: If we can’t laugh we should just give up now. You know what I’m saying? We should just give up now. You’ve got to laugh.

Carrie: Truth. We’ve got just a few more minutes left here. So anybody that is tuning in and wants to have Kori’s undivided attention hastag it at #officefm and we’ll do our best to get to that. Kori I have a couple more questions for you myself. I do very much want to very much thank our partners at DreamHost for (breaks up) DreamPress 2 that is even faster and awesome than before. You can check them out at Dreamhost.com/officehours. And then our other host ManageWP which Kori I know you’re going to go check this out after we get off the show.

 

Kori: I took a note. I wrote it down.
Carrie: Sweet. Take that note. And a special Howdy shout out to Vladimir, their president. He’s got…the baby’s coming. I don’t know if the baby has arrived yet. We are wishing him and his family congratulations. That has absolutely nothing to do with their service but you can learn more and sign up for a free trial. Throw some of your WordPress accounts over there and see what you think. You know we’ve already discussed  you have no time to sleep because of all the things you’re already doing. But what do you do to…how do you keep your ear to the ground…learn new things…are you reading blogs? Are you listening to Podcasts? Like what’s your resources?

Kori: Sure. So my whole family as far back as I can remember have been educators…teachers. Really one of the best ways to always stay ahead of the game is to teach it. So I love the fact that we have to teach it because there’s nothing worse than a student walking into your classroom and telling you hey are you scoping today? And you’re like I do this for a living. I have no clue what you’re talking about. So if I’m not already up to speed following certain blogs and hanging out on Twitter and listening to your Podcast…checking you out and making sure that I’m up to speed with what you’re doing…I’m having a student keeping me in check. They’re coming and telling me. Hey. You need to be on this. You need to be doing this. Or what is this? Lets look into it together and that really helps me. Plus we’re teaching classes with our Meetup group. There’s nothing better than getting a question from somebody at a Meetup group that you don’t know the answer to. Because now I’m going to go learn something today. Let’s figure it out together and let’s sit down and Google it together. We’re going to find out. But yeah. I’m avid on wptavern. I’m always getting their e-mails and following them and search engine watch. I check those guys out. Search engine journal for SEO coolness. Amaz obviously. I do watch a lot of YouTube videos so I am a part of…I subscribe to their YouTube channels. I’m not much of a reader, Carrie. That’s so lame…but I…maybe it’s that I don’t have time but I would rather watch a YouTube video and hear somebody and feel their energy…and kind of…just what you’re doing here. Giving resources and getting resources in that same way.

Carrie: I feel you. It’s easier to consume that sort of information. I read a lot but just like trash fiction. Not like trashy fiction but…

 

Kori: You know what? You knew about the underwear. I’m just going to leave that alone. I don’t know.

 

Carrie: Do not touch the underwear anymore. Oh my gosh. But Kori, I have to say if you’re tuning into officehours to stay up on the latest and greatest technology my friend, you are going to come up a little bit short. I do like to think we have some great topics on the show but I’m glad you’re keeping an eye on some of those other blogs as well.

Kori: Heck Yeah. And specifically for WordPress I check out the WPwatercooler. That’s actually where you and I first met I think. You were one of their guests the same time I was…right? With Chris Lema and those guys?

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. I saw you’re lower third and I was like….whoa! Texas!
Kori: Yeah!
Carrie: How did we not come across paths yet?

Kori: That’s right. Heck yeah.

Carrie: So three cheers for community. Both meeting folks online and then maybe having the opportunity to meet them in real life sometime.

Kori: You and I met in real life in San Francisco at WordCamp, right? In October, right?

 

Carrie: We did. A little WPengine dinner and we got to sit at the same table. I think…I just want to apologize because I was not much of a conversationalist. I think I was brain dead. Which happens to me at WordCamps. I run out of brain space and conversational capability.

Kori: It was so loud in that restaurant though. I just remember a conversation I think about your dog…or dogs?
Carrie: Oh yeah. Good recall there. I have a couple of those guys. All right. We have a burning question from Nicole for you. She wants to know how do you bill your clients for ongoing work after the initial project is wrapped? I think you mentioned that you do hourly but do you any sort of retainer plans, maintenance plans, that sort of thing?

Kori: Yeah absolutely. I know we have to be brief here so I’m not going to go into my crazy long full description but I will tell you this…you will thrive…your company will actually survive the slow seasons and the big lulls that you’re going to have if you learn how to properly sell that ongoing retainer or support package. I’m going to give you one little snippet that might even help better. We changed the word to support packages. We no longer call them maintenance or retainers. People are getting it and they’re buying in.
Carrie: Awesome. And not to just do one more shameless plug…but seriously ManageWP is perfect for that model because it lets you set up all these sites. So at least for keeping the backups and plugins maintained and such. Do you find that…are you doing like phone support or the little tweaks on the website as part of that as well.

Kori: Yeah. Absolutely. Minimally everybody gets at least an hour a month whenever you sign up for us. It also includes premium hosting with WPengine. So we give quite a bit in our support packages that makes it so tantalizing that they typically don’t say no.
Carrie: So tantalizing that you can’t say no. You heard it here on officehours. Kori…absolute…I mean serious from the bottom of my Texas heart. It’s an absolute pleasure having you on today and chatting with you.

Kori: Thank you.
Carrie: If people don’t have the periscoping app yet, which I don’t even know if there is an app…where can people find you on the web to stalk you?

Kori: Yeah. So you can look at my lower third. That’s actually what this is called right here on the screen…(motions to the lower part of the screen)…not anything else. Come find me at my lower third. Come stalk me on YouTube also. We’ve got our YouTube.com/Webtegrity channel over there. Please come find me there. We’re doing all sorts of fun stuff. Free advice for WordPress.
Carrie: (Breaks up) @KoriAshton on Twitter. Cool.

 

Kori: You’re cutting in and out. I hope we’re saying Goodbye. I think you’re wonderful.

Carrie: I wasn’t quite yet saying bye but we probably should wrap it up.

 

Kori: I don’t know. I don’t want to leave. I could sit around all day and talk to you. I got my sweet tea. We’re good.

 

Carrie: Well we will let the listeners go so that they can get back to their afternoons and thank you everybody for tuning in. We will see you guys next week. Bye!