I wanted to follow up on what I talked about yesterday. I think the Women in WordPress topic is important and I'd like to continue to roll out my thoughts as I process them. While reading Sarah Pressler's post about WordCamps for Women I get the impression that some people don't like being offended and mean to create environments where it's impossible to be offended.
Skip the After Party Bars
There's been a lot of discussion recently about women in WordPress and how we should change the status quo. If you haven't been following along I would start with Sarah Gooding's post about Creating a Culture of Respect. There were some excellent follow ups by Chris Lema & Sarah Pressler.
There's a lot of information to digest and a lot to process. I want to write my opinion in response to these excellent posts but I'm honestly not ready. I work best by breaking things into smaller chunks and digesting those pieces and then moving on. That's why I'm starting with something tangential – why do we host after parties at bars?
Redesigning the Table Rate Shipping User Experience
At WooThemes we have 10,000 tickets a month. That's a lot. Like a lot a lot. When you're talking about numbers this big if we can redesign our products to make them more intuitive and reduce our support load by 5% that's 500 tickets a month! That's an entire ninja!
That's why one of the things I want to start looking into is the user experience of all of our products. If we can do less and make our existing products easier to use that will serve us better than adding yet more products that will increase our support load.
One of our products that I think could use work is Table Rate Shipping. It's one of our most configurable and powerful products. The downside of configuration is that it's also complex. It's not one of our top selling products but it is one of the products that needs the most support. Clear candidate for a redesign.
Do Less
One of the things I enjoy most about vacation is taking some time to read. It's nice to think about new ideas and just let your brain roam free latching on to whatever you want. One of the books I read was REWORK by 37 Signals. They're the guys who run BaseCamp & Highrise CRM. They put out some revolutionary ideas on their blog and one of the founders made a phenomenal TED Talk about time wasted at work.
They talk a lot about bad business practices and how they do everything backwards and how it works out really well for them.
WordCamp Phoenix 2014 Highlights
There's snow swirling outside as I sit in my comfy chair at my local coffee shop back in Green Bay. I got back into Green Bay late last night after an amazing WordCamp Phoenix last weekend. If you haven't ever been to a WordCamp you have to go. They're a very affordable conference where you get to meet other people in your industry & hear all sorts of presentations related to WordPress.
Building a Sustainable Business with the Freemium Model
Today I'm presenting Building a Sustainable Business with the Freemium Model at WordCamp Phoenix.
WordCamp Phoenix 2014
Hey everyone!
Things you can do in Phoenix that you can't do in Green Bay
I'm enjoying the nice sunny weather in Arizona (which means I escaped Green Bay huzzah!). It's January 14th and it's a high of 70 degrees. I've done rock climbing, hiking, and explored the downtown. I'm in heaven. I'll also be speaking at WordCamp Phoenix later this week.
Accept Frustration and Move On
With any luck when this post is published I should be on a plane to Phoenix Arizona and I'm going to be so happy to be on my way.
Let Open Source Encourage Diversity
One of the things that constantly amazes me at my job is the number of ways that people use WooCommerce. There's over 200 extensions available for WooCommerce on the WooThemes.com site and there's demand for thousands more. So what does WooThemes do? Do we go on a massive hiring spree and build thousands of plugins?
I'm sure we could do that but why? No matter how many extensions we create there's just no way to cover every single use case one of our users come up with. There's also no way we can be experts in every single market. There's thousands of substandard services out there that we don't want to integrate, and there will be problems finding the right extension if we offer thousands. The trick here is to encourage other experts to work with you so that you can create an exceptional product for 90% of your audience and other developers can cover the last 10%. Let your open source project encourage diversity.
2013 Freelancing Review
I already talked a little about how I did with my 2013 resolutions but after reading Pippin's 2013 review I really wanted to add a little bit about how my freelancing & extension development has worked out.