We talked about extensibility, structure, best practices, updates, support, documentation, and more. You can check it out below:

WordSesh has been awesome in general. The conference is still happening. It’s running 24 hours straight, completely online. We had over 200 people in chat while we talked, which was fantastic.

I also spent about fifteen minutes talking with Coen Jacobs and Scott Basgaard, from WooThemes, in their talk on WooCommerce. It was very nice of them to invite me to give my perspective on WooCommerce.

WordPress plugins WordSesh talk with Pippin Williamson is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

I ran across this infographic on HelpScout that contains statistics about the costs of bad customer service. It’s just another great example of how important it is to deliver great service. In my opinion, great customer service can go a long way to make up for a product’s flaws.

The cost of bad customer service is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

I’m honored to have been asked to do an interview with Code Poet. Code Poet is a great resource for eBooks and other things. Their interview series is also fantastic. I was extremely excited to be asked by them to do an interview, and I hope you enjoy it. They did a really thorough job of researching personal questions to ask me, so I was able to go into much more depth than I have before. Some of the questions really made me think about things I haven’t thought of before!

Code Poet interview is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Hourly rate calculator is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Just over a month ago, I launched Post Status. Post Status is essentially a WordPress news and information link blog, with a little extra flavor. The first month has been full of excitement, surprise, some disappointment, and a lot of fun. I like to be as open as possible, so I’m going to tell you everything on my mind about my little side project.

Why did I start it?

I got started with WordPress in a small way around 2008, but really entrenched myself in the WordPress community in early or mid 2010. Throughout that time, keeping up with everything going on in the community has always been a challenge.

At times, various websites and people have done a great job of keeping up, and I relied on them. I even contributed to one for a long time. But no website has really stayed relevant consistently, because it’s a demanding thing. No one has mastered how to sustain a WordPress news site for any sort of long haul.

Much of WordPress “news” consists of regurgitated blog posts, even when on popular WordPress news sites. This makes sense, because so many WordPress news makers have blogs! I know what it’s like to write these posts. Paragraph, quote, screenshot, paragraph. It takes time. But is it really relevant? Sometimes. But not always. Usually, the source does a pretty good job of describing the content, so what’s the need for a post from a news site?

The added benefit from a WordPress “news” post, to me, is the brief context or quick opinion that can be added to the story, as well as the pure filtering of global WordPress news on the site as a whole. But the screenshots, quotes, and full paragraph summaries are largely filler material in my opinion.

So I decided WordPress needed a place where just the relevant things could take place. That’s where Post Status was born. It’s a curation site. Titles are relevant. Very short descriptions are relevant. Perhaps a sentence or two of personal input make sense. But my goal on Post Status is for people to leave Post Status and visit the original article. I think this makes the most sense for the ecosystem.

How Post Status works

I don’t try to make Post Status what it doesn’t need to be. I don’t do tutorials, list posts, interviews, podcasts, etc. Instead, I link to great sources of information that do these things. I certainly add context, and I hope readers value that, but the primary goal of any post is to share just enough information with my readers so that they can decide whether the post is worth clicking on and reading at the source level.

Post Status can also be an appropriate place for comments and conversation. If the linked source doesn’t have comments turned on, or if the conversation is more about the context offered in the link versus the source information itself, it makes sense to have comments on Post Status. Also, sometimes discussions can be on Post Status if a post marries multiple links to form a more general conversation. Here’s a good example.

One thing I do ask of readers is to vote. That’s been a big struggle so far, and it’s probably my own fault. I originally required people to be logged in to upvote posts, which was probably too optimistic; not to mention the usability of the voting button didn’t make sense. It looked like a comment count if the user is logged out. I’ve changed that now. Anyone can vote on posts, whether they are logged in or not, using a cookie based system.

The votes help me a great deal. It helps me know the type of things people like, so I can feature more articles that are similar.

What I’ve learned

I’ve learned a ton.

Asking people to register for the site just to vote on articles wasn’t a great idea.

After a good start, voting really died down. Making that change was pivotal. For a while there, the site really looked dead with all those non-upvoted posts.

Traffic does not magically appear.

It takes hard work. The site is brand new, and the search traffic is pathetic (I’ll talk more stats soon). The primary source is social traffic. So unfortunately, I’m using my own Twitter account to pimp Post Status quite a bit. Hopefully I can change that as Post Status grows, but for now, it’s the primary traffic source.

Perception is key

Many people view Post Status as “just” a link blog. That’s okay, but I think I’m adding more context. That’s why I have excerpts, after all. If I didn’t think so, I’d just submit titles; but I think the excerpts are valuable. I just don’t have verification of that. Due to the perception of Post Status as a link blog, I often publish a post, and then see tweets linking straight to the source soon after. I don’t mind that, but a “via” goes a long way

I think because I market it as a link blog, people don’t necessarily assign value to where the link came from, or the fact that the link was also good enough for them to share.

This is a tricky dance, and I’m not sure I translated it well here. But nevertheless, the point is that the perception you offer people for your website is likely the one they will accept.

People rarely submit

If you read the “Welcome to Post Status” post, you’ll see more emphasis on user submissions. I compare it to Hacker News, Reddit, etc. But in reality, people just don’t submit very often. Don’t get me wrong, I freaking love when they do. But as of this moment I’ve submitted over 60% of the posts.

To date, 13 people have submitted more than one post. I’m very excited about every submission I get, but I accept the reality that a tiny percentage of readers will ever be submitters. Maybe it’s the barrier to do so (logging in), maybe I’ve set it up poorly; I don’t know. I’ll be playing with this more in the future.

People generally like the concept

Most everyone I’ve talked to have been super positive about the concept of Post Status. This is exciting to hear. I think it has promise, obviously. But what I’ve learned is that people’s positivity about the site doesn’t necessarily turn them into unrelenting advocates.

What I mean is, the ideal reader is someone that considers Post Status as part of their daily workflow. I want people to read it every day, share it every day, and advocate for the site itself. I’ve yet to prove that Post Status is worthy of many such advocates, and it’s a goal moving forward to make readers this happy. And of course, that will take time, and more importantly, consistency.

I should have just launched

Pre-launch I stressed pretty hard about how to structure the site. How would I handle commenting? What about voting? What about registration and submissions? What about calculating popular posts?

Screw all of that. I should’ve just launched the damn thing as a link blog and built what people asked for as they asked for it. Instead, I spent too much time trying to predict how people would use the site, and I was wrong in many ways.

Post Status could’ve launched months earlier if not for the fretting I did. Once I actually decided on things, the site build didn’t take long at all. It was the deciding, and deciding incorrectly, where I wasted all my time.

Stats so far

This post is getting long, so I should share the site’s progress for the initial month.

In short, it’s been a wild ride with incredible variation.

• Let’s start with published posts:
• 205 posts have been published in 35 days
• The most popular categories are Development (56), Plugins (37), News (27), Themes (18), Discussion (18), Business (14), and Design (11). The rest are spread across nine more categories.
• There have been 429 upvotes on posts. 28 posts have 5 or more upvotes.

Here are the stats from Google Analytics:

• 5,607 unique visitors
• 11,319 visits
• 19,349 pageviews
• 2:04 average visit duration
• 1.71 pages per visit
• 62.65% bounce rate
• 1,530 clicks to outbound articles

The last stat matters the most to me. Post Status has helped generate at least 1,530 visitors to other people’s great content. I hope that number continues to grow.

All in all, these stats are okay for the first month, but they aren’t astounding. And they are super influenced by social. Like, big time.

Here’s a sample of referrers:

• Twitter accounts for 4,462 of overall visits
• Direct visits: 2,292 visits
• RSS: 992 visits
• Hacker News: 677 visits
• Google: 424 visits

The site has had 7 days with over 1,000 pageviews. A decent day where content is being both posted and shared, the site is getting 300-600 pageviews. Some posts have done particularly well and driven the 1000+ pageview days. The bad news is that there are a handful of sub 100 pageview days as well. And that’s the nature of the social beast.

So, what I’m saying, is I appreciate you a great deal each and every time you share Post Status on your social networks and with your friends. It truly means a lot to me.

Monetization

I’d love to monetize Post Status. I make no qualms about it. But I intend to do it openly, and in a non-terrible manner.

My favorite concept for monetizing so far is to use a sponsorship model. So basically, I would sell complete sponsorship of the site: one advertiser, with their product featured in various attractive formats throughout the site for one month.

I’d charge one flat fee. If I value a conversion for the sponsor (as in, someone buys their product from clicking my link) at $100, then I need 10 people per month to convert from Post Status to make $1000 per month.

In addition to the display ads on the site, it makes sense to me to do an honest review of the product, available on the site. That way, a permanent record for the sponsor is available.

I would not allow a sponsor whose product I haven’t tested and approve of. No exceptions. If the sponsor has an affiliate program, I’d put it at the bottom of the review, with disclosure. If they don’t, I’d still include the link just the same.

My question is: I wonder what sponsors think of this idea? I’ve talked to one or two people about the concept, and have been told it depends on if it converts. So we’ll see. I haven’t decided when or exactly how to implement such a system, but I’d like to roll it out in the next few months and see how it goes.

I’m excited

I’m really excited about this project. I’ve had a great time managing and curating valuable WordPress news, links, and resources for Post Status. I’ve always done it, just via Twitter. So it’s really fun to have a more permanent place to share things I find about the community I so enjoy.

I hope that you found this post worthwhile. I’ll continue to be as open as possible.

I look forward to a bright future for Post Status. And I ask that if you enjoy it, that you please share it on your social networks, vote on your favorite posts, and even submit posts if you feel so inclined. Also, there’s a newsletter signup available, and soon I’ll start sending personal letters through the newsletter as well.

Hello, Post Status is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

In short, it’s a complete mess. I’ve heard much of it from my immediate family, as my wife and parents are all in healthcare. But I’ve never seen all of our country’s issues described quite like this. The article is absolutely brilliant, and entirely depressing. He gives a few minutes of synopsis of the article on The Daily Show as well.

The one additional aspect he simply couldn’t cover in the scope of his article is the state of health insurance coverage for American employees. Under the current system, the fear of not having health insurance is an enormous burden to potential entrepreneurs, small business owners, would-be retirees, and who knows who else.

I implore any American to read this article, even if you think you don’t care. Fair warning though, it’s 25,000 words. It took me two hours to read. But what he discusses affects everyone, and it will likely be the biggest long term political issue for my generation.

Healthcare is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Give it a listen!

Appearance on The Little Web Show with Justin Seeley is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

I find this very exciting, because it’s an opportunity for me to further define my points about sliders and to show them where they were misguided in how they perceived what I was trying to say. In fact, a lot of people were a bit misguided from that post. It seems many people read the top half, but not much into the part where I discuss how sliders can sometimes be effective. But I’ll get more into that with the full follow-up.

So, go listen to the podcast (my section starts around 30 minutes in) – even if not for them talking about me, but because it’s a great podcast – and then be ready for my “rebuttal” to come soon.

My “Sliders Suck” post is discussed on the Boagword podcast is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Most web products use a tiered pricing structure. And with such a structure, psychology plays a real part in your offerings. I recommend you take this post into consideration if you’re pricing your new product. I know I will when I finally have something to sell.

As a side not on Nathan Barry, he’s started a series on his Web App Challenge. He’s documenting his attempt to go from not even having a formed idea, to making $5,000 a month in residual income , in only 6 months. I’m definitely going to keep up.

Pricing pages is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Sliders (almost always) suck.

Why? Let me count the ways:

1) Speed

Sliders add bloat to a website. Most rely on jQuery and the slider script. Also, most sliders load all of the images or other information that is to be displayed in the slider on the initial page load. So if your slider is 1000px by 600px, and you have four images in the rotation, you are loading four huge images on that page load.

That better be some valuable content in those sliders, or you are wasting valuable time before your page properly loads. What happens when your page takes more time to load? People leave before looking at anything at all, much less your fancy slider.

So, consider speed when choosing a slider, if you must have one.

2) Sliders are not for action

When I hear clients express that they want a slider, they usually want it for the wrong reasons. Sliders, in my opinion, are only valuable for display purposes; they are not good for action taking.

Think how you use the web. Do you load a web page, and watch a slider scroll all the way through every item, and wait to click on the thing you like best? I hope not. Most of us want to be able to quickly and easily get to where we want to go.

With a slider, you either have to wait to see what comes along, and then click through to a destination URL from the slider’s call to action. Or you have to tab through with the slider’s controls, and then click again to go to the destination url of the slider. This is more work, and I don’t think many people are going to take that sort of action.

3) Sliders are not good for mobile

We’re so focused on targeting our websites to mobile visitors these days. Yet, we’re just as committed to the slider as ever. Why? The slider will slow down load times for mobile websites (just imagine those load times with 3G or less!) and are even less usable on a phone.

A good slider, like Flexslider, will have support for swiping, but it’s still not a logical action for someone on a phone. Scrolling is so simple, why not let people just scroll through the page to see your important content instead?

4) What fold?

The fold is dead. Keeping content above the fold is the primary reason I hear from people that want a slider. Stop it.

5) Distraction

Don’t even get me started on all the distractions I see in sliders. You’ve seen them in commercial themes. Huge box shadows. Crazy blocks that flip all over the page on rotation. Ken burns. I just cried typing that.

Why are we still using sliders?

Probably a few reasons here too:

• Because it’s the easy way out in design
• Clients ask for them
• Ooh, it moves.

If you must slide

If you must use a slider, use it for display purposes, and preferably not on the homepage.

Why?

Because you want the homepage to load fast. Really fast. Google likes that. People like that.

The link above to Chris Lema’s post on slider performance indicates that the best performing slider can load in as little as half a second; but the slowest performers were almost five seconds. Yuck!

Appropriate places for sliders:

• Showcasing product photos – multiple images of the same thing. Not a convoluted mess.
• Showcasing a gallery of images for a portfolio. Same idea. Multiple images of the same concept.
• Display, display, display. Where the looking at the slider is the end goal, not an avenue to get to the end goal.

Notice the pattern? Keep your sliders in sync if you use them. Each slide should represent something of an overall topic for that slider. Don’t have a homepage slider where the first image is a banner for an event, the next one for your services, and the third a banner for your contact form. That’s too much. Give those items the real estate they deserve, don’t force them into one little box in a rotating pattern.

Please, please, do me a favor and only use simple fade effects if you insist on a slider. And try to include thumbnail navigation and pagination overlays too, to make it easy to get around. The pictures or slider content should do the talking, not some crazy effect or over-done styles on the container.

The slider I’m using as the banner image on this post is a good example of a nice slider. It’s using a fast script, has thumbnail navigation and directional navigation. And it’s showcasing pictures of a single space, so it’s all one theme. If you must slide, slide like this.

Also, if you include a call to action for your slider, I recommend only having one, and make it visible on each slide. That way, the images in the slides are still for display, but the call to action is the same on each; this way the user doesn’t have to find the right slider to go to the next step. Whether your call to action is a form, a click, or whatever, don’t have a different one on each slide. If you feel like you need a different call to action for each slide – rethink your use of a slider.

And never, ever let the slider be the only content on the page. People, and Google, like words. Give them words and descriptive text. A Slider alone is not enough.

So, yeah

You are free to disagree with me about proper usage of sliders. But I’ve seen these things for so long, it’s going to take a heck of an argument to change my mind! Bring it on.

Sliders Suck is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Image via Yuri’s post

I recently came across a great read from Yuri Victor, the user experience director for the Washington Post. According to Yuri, their first experiment with WordPress was with Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog (a great blog, by the way). He loved WordPress, so they started rolling it out to a bunch of their other blogs.

It’s encouraging to see such a great testimonial from such a huge news provider. It’s especially great to hear how quickly they’ve been able to innovate and iterate in their organization, which I imagine might have been quite hard in the past with other systems.

This is a perfect post to keep around to show a potential newsy, or multi-author client that is nervous about moving to WordPress from a proprietary system. I personally worked on the new WeldBham.com, and they also love WordPress. So from multi-national to local news outlets, it’s safe to say WordPress is rocking it. It’s simply a great tool for publishing content.

h/t: Aaron Jorbin

Incredible testimonial for WordPress from the Washington Post is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

Pricing is a strange game in the consulting market. As consultants, we want to make as much as we can, and simultaneously we tend to charge for our time, and not for our value. Why do we do this? And how can we change?

The dynamic is a tough one. Often, we get leads from people or organizations we know, and we understand that they have a budget. So I’m sure that you, like me, have tried to assess your potential clients needs and put together a quote that will meet those needs; but you always have a dollar amount in the back of your head that you assume is as high as they can go.

Maybe they even told you their max budget. And it’s tough to get outside that mindset.

But if we are to truly make as much as we can, and more importantly, as much as we’re worth, perhaps we need to reconsider the value we bring as skilled developers and to the web project as a whole.

And if we can’t justify our value to the client, perhaps we should reconsider the client.

Potential Clients

Let’s throw out a number:

$15,000.

This is a number that represents your time for some website. It doesn’t matter what all goes into that number. It’s a calculation of your hours multiplied by “x” functionality, at your hourly rate.

A client with an already successful business is the easy kind.

The value of this sort of website can be assessed to a degree.

What does this number mean to a client with an already successful business? Probably not much. Maybe they make $5 million a year, or maybe they make $500 million a year. Either way, paying $15,000 for a new website is not very much money for this type of client. They just want the job done right.

In fact, $15,000 is probably too cheap. The website is important in a modern business. It’s no longer a yellow pages for the web. It’s the brand hub for just about any modern company.

$15,000 could be so low for such a business that they are afraid you will be flaky and unreliable. Four times out of five, you might lose this potential client for being too cheap.

Now let’s assess that $15,000 price tag again.

Except this time, the $15,000 is for a client with business plan, but it’s not off the ground yet. Suddenly, with a lack of expected income, and so many unknowns, $15,000 is a ton of freaking money.

The website is no different. The “modules”, or anticipated necessary functionality, hasn’t changed.

But the mindset is completely different.

Now someone is putting their money in your hands. You – the consultant. There is a huge (in their mind) sum of cash tied up in this website that could help make or break them.

The value of the website is considerably lower in this scenario. But the risk is much, much higher than our first scenario.

Now let’s assess that $15,000 price tag one more time.

This time, you’ve got a potential client with a “great idea.” It’s not their full time job yet, but if you can develop this website for them… man! They can rock it. This eCommerce site, or listings business, or ad-driven blog will be fantastic!

Problem is, they have no business model. They’ve come to you with an idea for a website, but that’s not a business model. Is it?

And all the chips they’ve got are in this website.

You’re no longer a web developer. You are a partner.

And you didn’t even ask to be.

If this business doesn’t get off the ground, it’s probably because you did a poor job developing the website. “This was a sure thing”, says the client.

What’s your value?

In each scenario above, I’ve of course simplified the myriad of potential client situations that could come your way. But my point is that the value of the website for each client is completely different.

But we tend to price them pretty much in the same way. As a linear calculation of our hours and rate.

A website with the same functionality, that takes the same time, has completely different value to these three clients.

So why are we continuously quoting our time at a set rate and not often enough considering the following:

1. Our value as skilled developers.
2. The overall value that we bring to the web project.

Suddenly, we’re in a whole new ballgame.

We’re able to say no to clients without a business plan, and we’re able to justifiably charge more for clients that consider their websites to be a valuable part of their existing business, or charge appropriately for clients with a business plan they are willing to invest in properly (if this is client #2).

No longer will the potential client put the weight of the entire business on us, the developers. Because we no longer accept those types of clients.

And we’re charging more to the clients that value their website as a significant part of their business. So all in all, we’re making better money on the good clients, and avoiding losing money on the bad clients.

Further reading

If you are nodding your head yes, but you want to know how to put some of this to practice, I highly recommend you read this article by Patrick McKenzie that discusses charging for value, with practical steps for growing a consulting business.

Value vs hours: how do we know when the price is right? is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

There have been some very good parts of 2012, and some tough parts as well. Here’s a detailed account, numbers and everything, of the various aspects of my professional life.

Blogging

Let’s start with some post counts across various parts of the internet.

• This blog – This post is my 40th of the year. I’m quite happy with the blogging I’ve done here. I’ll touch more on it shortly.
• WPCandy – 19 posts in 2012. Certainly less posting than I expected this year at WPCandy. Though I think one or two of my posts got lost when WPCandy had a big hosting issue a few months back.
• Infomedia blog – 2 posts. I wrote for our company blog a couple of times in 2012. Though they didn’t get much discussion, I actually enjoyed writing them.

That means that I blogged 61 times this year that I can count, or a little more than once per week. Not bad, but I can do better.

Krogsgard.com

The growth of this site has been a high point on my year. I’ve had only a few posts that didn’t get any discussion, and I had a few that got really, really great discussion. And the traffic has been pretty steady too, though that’s a secondary goal to the quality of the posts and the discussion.

But I know you want to see the stats. Yes, they are still pretty poor. But they are much, much better than before. And the growth is promising:

That’s about a 270% growth year over year. In a year, I’d like to average 20,000 visits per month rather than 27,000 all year, to keep people on my site longer, and for them to bounce less.

I had a couple of spikes during the year. One post on Google fonts (not) displaying on Kindle Fire did pretty well on Reddit (though not a target audience), and my Jetpack post has simply been huge. That post alone has gotten almost 8,000 impressions since I wrote it in July, and there are 84 comments, many of which are from Matt Mullenweg. It is my top post in search results, and gets pretty continuous traffic from poor searchers having woes with the plugin. But what is staggering is that people are reading it. The average time on that URL is almost 9 minutes.

I counted 150 comments between all posts in 2012, which is great! Comments are like blogger caffeine. And what’s really great is that people I respect are commenting. That feels really awesome, every time. New posts are getting between 200 and 500 “day 1″ views on average, with my best performing posts getting 500-1100 “day 1″ views. I want to turn the best performers into averages next year.

I also finally redesigned this site in December. I’m excited to analyze some stats soon, and finish building out new sections, as I outlined in the post about the redesign.

I have no intentions of slowing down my blogging here. I love writing and sharing my thoughts, and I want to make it a bigger priority, with dedicated time. My current method is to write at a moment’s notice when I just can’t stand not writing. I want to be more consistent, and write thoughtful things about the web and the WordPress community.

WPCandy

I wrote over at WPCandy much less this year than last, about two-thirds less, and my last post was in August. I hope Ryan is successful at WPCandy, but I’ve decided to move on. It’s just not the right fit for me anymore.

I’m glad I contributed there for two years. I wrote around 120 posts in total, and recorded a couple dozen podcasts too. WPCandy was a great place for me to grow in the WordPress community. But I have a lot of things I want to do still, and I need to make room for those things somewhere.

Social Media

One interesting metric to look at for the past year is Twitter stuff. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s addictive, or because it’s professionally valuable, or what, but I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Too much, my wife will tell you. But it’s had some payoff in 2012. I’m thankful to have a heck of a water cooler to sit around and share and talk to you guys. Here’s an image of my year in numbers on Twitter:

I’m thrilled to have new followers, but what I get excited about in those numbers is that I’ve gotten a half decent number of replies, retweets, and favorites on the things I share. The web development community is certainly its own breed, and it’s really fun to be a part of it. I think Twitter is a big part of why I enjoy what I do, and I know I’ve gained both professional contacts and even friends from it. So I thought it was worthwhile for this post.

WordCamp SF

Speaking of relationships, WordCamp San Francisco was absolutely amazing. It was fantastic to meet so many people in person. I made  a lot of friendships “IRL official” (I just made that up maybe) and had hundreds of great conversations. If you are on the fence about going to WordCamps in general, and especially one of the big ones. Stop thinking about it. Go.

Contributions

Another year has gone by that I didn’t get props in WordPress core. I. will. not. let. that. happen. again. Now, I’m really on the hook, right?

In addition to contributing to core this coming year, I’m really interested in the docs project. I think that’s a place where I could potentially make a difference.

I do feel like I’ve at least had some level of involvement on other projects though. I’ve been trying to communicate feedback to plugin authors whenever I can. I especially enjoy talking to the fine folks who build WooCommerce. A couple of my feature requests are going into the plugin, and they are just really nice people who make a great product. I’d love to build an extension for WooCommerce this year.

Side Projects

Oh, side projects. I’m always dreaming things up. My struggle has been that I think something is a great idea, then I start on it, and then I convince myself that my idea was the worst thing on the planet, and I move on. There are good and bad aspects to that workflow. The good is that most of my ideas probably are terrible. The bad is that I never let anyone else decide so.

Plugins

On a bright note, I released two plugins this year: Toolbar Quick View and Really Simple Series. Both are pretty trivial, but I use them both, and at least a couple other people seem to as well (emphasis: a couple).

Themes

I’ve also worked a ton on the Happy theme project. I started out what has thus far been a disappointing series on building WordPress themes, with Happy being the example theme. Well, it turns out Happy ended up being more of a base theme, that I’m actively developing and using on new personal and client sites. But I am going to write the series, and I’ll just tailor it more generally and maybe with a less general purpose theme.

So the Happy theme is in a weird place where it doesn’t know what it wants to be. I haven’t fully decided whether to have a separate base theme that’s not really for public release, and then make Happy a version of my site design, or if the base should be a real theme. I’m leaning toward Happy being a less generic theme. I’m kind of over generic themes. Either way, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about theme architecture this year, and while I’m behind where I wanted to be, I’m happy with where I am.

New Project

I have one more side project that is very hot on my mind. The idea has evolved for a long time, and it’s a much-needed thing in the WordPress community, I think. A few folks I’ve talked to about it think so too. It’s going to happen very soon. And I’m beyond that point of “this is a terrible idea” mentioned above ; ) so it’s officially happening. It’s my top January priority.

Freelance and Monetization

I had a goal this year to make $10,000 in freelance and side income. That goal was totally arbitrary, and I basically made zero distinct effort to reach it. I just did small freelance work when it came to me and the situation fit, and didn’t if it didn’t. I ended up making less than $5,000 in extra income this year, not including freelance / overtime work I did specifically for Infomedia, where I work full-time. I don’t know the exact figure under $5k, as I have to cobble together all of my invoices, but either way: weak sauce.

It would be pretty easy to make this number higher next year. I just have to do less stuff for free, and more stuff for money. But sometimes I like building websites for free when I can really help a great organization. So we’ll see. Either way, I’m available for some freelance work periodically, if you’re ever interested. How’s that for a sales pitch?

I’d rather spend more efforts next year monetizing my blogging and perhaps monetizing on some side projects, than worrying about freelancing too much. I get to work with some pretty awesome clients at Infomedia, so I like to spend more outside time doing my own thing than selling my time to other people.

Specifically, I want to introduce tasteful affiliate links in my blog(s). That’s why I’m building my toolset section of this website. I explain more in my post about my site redesign if you care. I’d also love to sell a theme, perhaps even on (gasp!) Themeforest. Or maybe I’ll do something totally different. Who knows! But one thing is for sure, I’m human too, and side money is good money. Next year, I’d be pumped to make $20,000 on the side. Like, really pumped.

Work and skills

This is where 2012 really shines for me. I’m so happy to say that I learned more about WordPress, web development, and even design in 2012 than ever before. It’s been a great year for my brain.

I’ve had outstanding opportunity at Infomedia to have control over what we do, WordPress-wise. And it’s been great. I’ve learned a ton about PHP and other languages from the very, very talented Brian Dichiara. And I consider David Hickox to be a mentor on both design and web perspective in general. I learn from all of my coworkers, and I love what we’re doing at Infomedia.

I feel more versed across the board technically. In fact, as you may expect, I’m utterly ashamed of any code I’ve written before… well, take your pick when. I learn every day, from coworkers, from the Google, and from you. I love learning, and I don’t intend to stop.

Specifically, I want to continue getting better with PHP next year, and I want to wrap my head around JavaScript too. WordPress is likely heading toward more JavaScript based development, via Backbone, so I want to stay with the program. I shudder as I type.

2013

2012 was a fantastic year. I learned. I grew. I made friends. I don’t think I made too many enemies. I’m very pleased with it.

In 2013 I want to narrow my focus. Really concentrate on what’s most important, and be willing to say no to other things. A year from now, I want to be writing about how I reached my goals, launched my personal projects, and really went for it even more than this year.

I’ve been incredibly blessed in 2012, and am so thankful for every minute of it. So cheers to all of you for reading these 2,000 words (if you made it) and here’s to whatever the next year holds in store!

2012 reflections and 2013 goals is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

I don’t like this concept very much. For one, it only works on page load, not window resize. But hey, it works. And surely Google is going to figure this stuff out and help us utilize responsive ads soon.

Personally, I’d rather deliver ads locally and then I can do whatever I want, without iframes. But so much of the ad industry apparently works this way, so for now, this is all I can manage.

How are you handling advertisements for responsive design?

Serve different Google Ad slots based on window size is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.

I consider Bill to be the cream of the crop of freelance WordPress developers, and you really should read and digest his post if you are a WordPress professional of any sort. I especially love where he talks about how he justifies raising his prices every year, and why he chooses the type of work that he does.

Bill Erickson on consulting – a must read for WordPress professionals is a post by Brian Krogsgard. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment.