Right out of the box WooCommerce creates a shop page and displays a grid of products which works quite nicely for stores with dozens of products. But what about the stores that only have one or two products? Or just one product with a couple different levels? Sometimes it's best to have a single page that lays out the pros and cons of each product rather than a grid of products. You can easily add a pricing table to WooCommerce with Easy Pricing Tables freely available on WordPress.org.
New Job Title: WooThemes Developer
Exactly one year ago I joined WooThemes and I got to work with the WooCommerce support team. As of today I'm switching roles and my new job title will be WooThemes Developer.
Announcing WooCommerce E-Book
Today is a fun day. It's the day that I'm finally ready to announce that I'm writing an e-book all about WooCommerce. I present to you The Store Owner's Guide to WooCommerce.
SIDEKICK Releases Interactive Walkthroughs for WooCommerce
To get five star reviews on the WordPress.org plugin repository you either need to plan the plugin perfectly (hint: that's impossible) or have an effective feedback loop to continuously improve your product. After a product is out in the wild you have to see how people are using it; study what they do right, what they do wrong, and what they can't possibly do but try anyways. You can make tweaks, add new features, and improve documentation. This is what I've been doing for the past 11 months at WooThemes and I love it.
Support isn't a problem you can solve but it is fun to see how much of it you can eliminate with good documentation and self serve tools for your users. With 100,000+ customers at WooThemes every little tweak we can make to our products affects how many tickets we get. That's why when I heard about SIDEKICK I jumped right in.
Build a Team of Evangelists
Earlier in the week I talked about evangelism and why it's important to have customers that can share your product. But before you can get those customers you need to inspire them. This is where it's important to have a team of evangelists that can get the ball rolling.
What is an Evangelist?
The other day someone off handedly called me a WooCommerce evangelist. I was happy being called that, but evangelist is one of those words that's hard to define. What exactly is an evangelist? How are they different from a sales person? Or different from a community manager?
For me it all comes down to intent.
PDF Form Submissions Add-On for Ninja Forms
I'm happy to announce my 7th add-on for Ninja Forms, PDF Form Submissions, is available!
I've been busily making minor improvements to all of my existing Ninja Form add-ons and I haven't had a new plugin announcement for a while. It feels pretty great to release something – especially something that relies on a huge pdf generation library. Best of all, I've made this extension pretty dummy proof. There really aren't any settings you can get wrong. You install it, check a checkbox and you're generating PDFs. You can automate the whole process.
Chunk Your Work Day
When I first joined WooThemes 10 months ago I had to learn how to work at home. This was a bit of a challenge because I love the work and I often found myself working too much. I was working all day and had a hard time sleeping. I've learned that good work isn't done by working long hours. It's about mentally & physically preparing yourself for work and getting several really productive hours in.
I started going to my favorite coffee shop in the afternoon just to get out of the house in the winter and then a funny thing happened. I started to restrict my work hours. Not only did I determine a start and end time but I also started doing certain types of work in different locations. Without realizing it I started to break my work day into different chunks. I used the different locations as psychological cues to get different types of work done. And with this I've left behind a lot of stress and uninspired / unproductive hours.
Why I Use a MacBook Air for Web Development
One of aspects of the web that I really enjoy are all the meetup groups you can go to. I love the chance to get together with other industry professionals and talk shop. I work on a remote team so I really appreciate every chance to chat with other developers. One of the questions that came up recently in my Appleton WordPress meetup group was on the subject of what computers everyone uses. What I recommend to everyone else is exactly the same thing that I use myself. I use a Macbook Air, 13″, with an external keyboard, external mouse, and a standing desk.
North American WooTrip 2014
We had our first North American team meetup this year. We decided, as a company, that face to face communication is one of our top priorities and in addition to our yearly WooTrip we want to have at least one smaller get together. Not only did I get to meet new coworkers face to face, but we also got to work together, and attend UserConf, a conference all about customer support.