Transforming Businesses into Extraordinary Brands
In the creative agency and web hosting spaces, partnerships are vital to business growth. The right strategic alliances can take your business from zero to sixty in no time by helping you acquire new clients, extend your reach, drive revenue, and build a network where referrals can flow between your agency and your web hosting partner.
Here are five critical things to share with a web hosting company while exploring the option to become a valued agency partner:
WordCamp Sacramento 2018 is on! Happening September 15-16, 2018 at the Sacramento Convention Center, WordCamp Sacramento is once again bringing two days of WordPress-focused learning, networking, and fun to California’s state capitol.
I was lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento in 2016 and 2017, growing the event from 180 attendees to 500 attendees, but there is a two year term limit on the position of lead organizer. This rule is in place to ensure that WordCamps remain a community event and don’t “die on the vine” when one community member leaves or moves away. What this also means is that this year I’m only the Speaker Wrangler and Brian is only the VIP Dinner Wrangler, which means we aren’t responsible for the overall planning, food, and coordination and I am not involved in the event design.
As Speaker Wrangler, I am in charge of the event curriculum and the management of the speakers, and now that the speakers, the sessions, and the official WordCamp schedule have been announced, I can tell you that I am over the moon excited about the event, especially the all new, two-day Beginner Track!
This past Thursday Bourn Creative founding partner, Jennifer Bourn, joined Jason Tucker and Bridget Willard for WP Blab, a WordPress-focused, conversational interview show. WPblab streams live every Thursday at 7:00 pm Pacific and is part of the Watercooler Network.
As a co-organizers for the Sacramento WordPress Meetup, co-organizers for WordCamp Sacramento 2015, and lead organizers for WordCamp Sacramento 2016 and WordCamp Sacramento 2017, Jennifer and I book a lot of speakers and beg a lot of community members to share their knowledge with us through speaking.
What do your project plans look like for client work? Are they working for you, or just more work for you? If you’re looking for a better process for your business, I teamed up with WPSessions to share a practical system that Bourn Creative has not only tested and refined over five years, but used on hundreds of real client projects. This is a battle-tested solution that will help you relieve stress, boost your profits, add value to your service offerings, and create happy clients.
If you answered yes to any of these questions, this webinar was created just for you!
I’ve been lucky enough, at industry events and at CaboPress, to spend some quality time with the talented folks over at LifterLMS. Not only do have they created a great product, the LifterLMS WordPress Plugin, they are also really good people. So when Chris Badgett reached out about being a guest on their podcast, LMScast, to talk about branding, of course I said yes!
In this podcast episode, Chris and I talk about branding as it relates to creating an online course.
After an incredible inaugural WordCamp Sacramento in 2015, that sold out in only two hours, it was clear that our Sacramento WordPress community wanted to improve their WordPress skills and meet other WordPressers in the greater Sacramento region — and that a weekend conference, separate from the monthly Sacramento WordPress meetup was very appreciated. I signed on to be lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento 2016, moving the event to the Sacramento State University Alumni Center, where we welcomed 31 speakers and 350 attendees of all skills levels for a weekend of learning, eating, networking, and fun.
For WordCamp Sacramento 2017, I am once again lead organizer, and once again moving to a new venue — a larger venue we won’t outgrow and hopefully can continue to host WordCamp at years to come. WordCamp Sacramento 2017 will be held September 16-17, 2017 at the Sacramento Convention Center, just steps from the California State Capital, historic attractions, and amazing restaurants, as well as mere blocks from the brand new Golden 1 Center and K Street Mall.
It was really difficult to turn people away after tickets sold out last year because of venue capacity, so I’m really excited that this year we’re taking over the entire second floor meeting space of the convention center and will have enough space to welcome everyone who would like to join us (as long as they buy a ticket by the pre-event cutoff date). We’re expecting around 500 WordPressers this year!
For those of us who work with WordPress daily, concepts like the difference between WordPress pages and posts seem obvious, but then I go to a networking event, blogging event, or conference, and I am reminded that what we as professionals see as obvious is often seen as complex and confusing to new users. This is especially true with WordPress posts and pages — and when custom post types are thrown in the mix, it gets even more confusing.
Just a couple weeks ago, a new client was asking new to explain the difference between WordPress pages and posts. I grinned, told them that I had already written an entire blog post on this very topic, and went to grab the link and email it to them. But I couldn’t find it. Had I really never clicked publish on this post? Did it get buried under newer posts and forgotten about? Yep. It sure did. So needless to say, I’m publishing it now and hoping it sheds some light on this topic for you too!
Today, a website is a fundamental requirement for every business. The process of planning, designing, and building a website is a critical step in establishing and launching a brand, yet website building is often fraught with problems caused by common misconceptions, misinformation, dangerous shortcuts, and poor guidance.
While no one thinks it will ever happen to them, even the most careful and savvy business owners fall victim to potential threats that sabotage their website’s success from day one.
Luckily, with the right mindset about your small business website, the right approach to creating your site, and the right website strategy to gain conversions, you can create a powerful website that works when you’re not working.
When you’re beginning to think about building a new website, the first step is getting in the right frame of mind so you avoid these three common website fallacies:
At Bourn Creative, we have been building websites since 2005, and working solely with WordPress as our platform of choice since 2008. Over the years, we have said the same thing to every client we work with: WordPress security starts with you.
I can’t emphasize enough how important this idea is when it comes to caring for and maintaining your WordPress website.
Many website owners think that all of the work to build their WordPress website happens up front, but in reality, the design, development and creation of a WordPress site is just the first step. When you launch a new WordPress site, you become a website owner, and as a website owner, it is your responsibility to take care of it, to care for it, and to keep it safe and healthy.
Owning any website, not just a WordPress website, requires ongoing maintenance. Your WordPress website is powered by the WordPress software, and all software — like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Apple iTunes, and all of the Apps on your phone — has ongoing updates that you must manage.
Ignoring software updates can cause a bevy of problems:
The good news is that you don’t have to be a tech-wizard to keep your WordPress site secure. Even if you’re non-technical, you can take steps to improve WordPress security. Here’s how.
It’s official! The Second Annual WordCamp Sacramento is back and it is bigger and better than ever.
Bourn Creative’s Jennifer Bourn and Brian Bourn give back to the WordPress community by donating their time as co-organizers of the monthly Sacramento WordPress Meetup, sharing their knowledge and expertise by speaking at WordCamps, and helping to bring WordCamp to Sacramento for its inaugural event in 2015. This year, Jennifer is the Lead Organizer for WordCamp Sacramento and Brian Bourn is on the event organizing committee.
After selling out last year’s event (150 tickets) in just over two hours and fielding a lot of emails and phones calls from unhappy folks who were unable to get a ticket, we knew that we needed a bigger venue for 2016.
WordCamp Sacramento 2016 is expanding to a two-day event, happening October 22-23, 2016 at the beautiful Harper Alumni Center at Sacramento State University. With a capacity of 350, we’re more than doubling the number of tickets available.
WordCamp Minneapolis, happening May 21-22, 2016 at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, is focused around the idea of intention and that our best work is always done when we have a sense of the greater purpose behind it.
With this theme in mind, many of the sessions will explore the reasons why we do things — whether that’s in development, design, content, teaching, learning, or strategy.
Bourn Creative’s own Jennifer Bourn will be speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis about The Path to Conversion, specifically on designing WordPress themes with intention so they support the clients’ goals, position them in the marketplace, help tell their brand story, and naturally guide visitors to take the desired action.
Most discussions and talks on WordPress theming are focused on development, but to write the code for and develop a WordPress theme, you first need design.
Web design plays a critical role in setting the tone of a website, focusing visitors’ attention, and guiding them through the site to a conversion with as little friction as possible. It also is responsible for shaping brand perception, audience emotion, and telling a story that not only produces results but resonates with clients and customers.
I’m guilty of it. Almost every blogger I know is guilty of it —, well, at least the bloggers who have been blogging for years. It’s a problem we caused that has haunted us for the life of our blog and now is either a huge task we know we need to tackle, or a huge task we’re just going to ignore and push to the side.
WordPress category and tag abuse is a real struggle. It’s how this blog at one point, ballooned to more than 30 categories and 800 tags that I then had to clean up.
Now you may be thinking, “So what? What’s the big deal”
The big deal is that not only does category and tag abuse split and fracture your content, it creates a poor experience for your website visitors, making it harder to find similar or related content about the topic they are interested in on your website.
The problem of category and tag abuse stems from the belief that categories and tags are similar to keywords, and that when assigned a category or tag to a blog post, it is the same as assigning a keyword to the post. This action is further perpetuated by the belief that assigning a post to a specific category or tag like a keyword somehow will help their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
Bourn Creative is excited to announce that managing partner, Brian Bourn will be speaking at WordCamp San Diego 2016. He joins a stellar line up of 2016 Plugin Track Speakers, delivering a talk on Custom Data Management Made Easier — An Intro To Custom Fields.
Custom fields and custom meta boxes can empower site managers to easily create complex page layouts only possible with extensive HTML markup, without writing a single line of a code. As a designer or developer, custom fields and meta boxes not only empower clients to create these layouts and manage extra site data, but also give you the power to control the markup ensuring proper, semantic HTML, and prevent support issues for “broken” layouts resulting from HTML errors.
In this talk Brian will cover:
The Sacramento WordPress Meetup kicked off 2016 with a fabulous new venue — The Urban Hive — and an event with 40+ guests attending, even on a super wet and rainy weekday night. Big thanks go out to everyone who made to out to the event!
The next Sacramento WordPress meetup is happening at 6:30pm on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at The Urban Hive. All 2016 events will be at this new venue, which also provides a hot coffee and tea bar for your enjoyment.
The topic, presented by Jennifer Bourn is Visual Storytelling Through WordPress Theme Design
Most discussions and talks on WordPress theming are focused on development, but to write the code for and develop a WordPress theme, you first need design. And, while the design of a WordPress theme plays a supporting role to the content, it is critical in setting the tone for the feeling of a website, focusing visitors’ attention, guiding them through the site to a conversion, and providing flexibility for future site enhancements and expansion.
In this talk we’ll cover:
The last time I wrote about the struggle designers and developers face with their portfolios, I wrote about the notion that the shoemaker’s kids never have shoes — and like the shoemaker, client projects always come first, and our own work often gets pushed off.
When we launched the current rebrand and redesign of Bourn Creative in October 2014, we had every intention of continuing to work on our portfolio, writing longer, case study style project descriptions, creating better imagery, and keeping it more current. But in October 2015, we realized that even though we had worked on some awesome projects with some of our favorite clients to date, it had now been a year and not a single new project was added to our portfolio.
Around the same time, we were neck deep in the fall rush of client projects and trying to squeeze in development time for my new personal blog. It was too much to fit into a sane work schedule, so Brian stopped development on my personal site and made a deal: Overhaul our old portfolio, add the new projects we want to feature, and write case studies for each one. When the portfolio was complete, he’d finish my site and give me access.
I was on a mission but it was slow going. Client work again came first, Soccer ate up our Saturdays, we co-hosted the inaugural WordCamp Sacramento (and I was in charge of all design, marketing, and communications), and we took family vacations at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Needless to say, it took longer than I had hoped, but today I finished.
I’m done done with the update of our portfolio and I’d love to share some of our favorite projects from 2015 with you. And, if you’re interested in reading the case studies and project descriptions for the projects, please check out our portfolio — I’m pretty proud of it!
The WordPress community as a whole had a big year. In his tenth annual State of the Word, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg shared some pretty impressive statistics regarding WordCamps and WordPress meetup groups. In 2015:
Our local Sacramento WordPress community has a lot to be proud of as well — and I’m not just saying that because Brian and I are two of the organizers along with Jake Goldman and Joe Boydston. In 2015, the Sacramento WordPress Meetup Group:
From the initial logo design and site development, to the content planning and blogging, the social media, email communication, the signage, name badge, and program design, and taking care of other event details and errands, for months, Brian and I have been neck-deep in WordCamp planning.
Now that WordCamp Sacramento is a wrap, we’re elated to call the event a tremendous success.
Driving out to the event Saturday morning, I was nervous and excited, and just hoped we’d have a smooth event — and that people would actually show up. We got registration setup, the signage up, and volunteers began to arrive. It was all coming together and it was do or die time. My stomach was doing some serious flip flops.
As people began to arrive and mill around the Happiness Room with coffee, snacks, and waters, they began chatting up the sponsors and grabbing a seat in the track rooms, and it got real really fast. WordCamp Sacramento was actually happening. It’s something we have been talking about for years, and finally it was here, people were here — and it felt really good.
Eleven Days. That’s It. There are only eleven more days until WordCamp Sacramento 2015.
I can hardly believe it.
We’ve been working with WordPress for seven years, and we’ve been attending WordCamps since 2011. We’re frequent WordCampers, traveling to WordCamps across the west coast as they fit into our schedule. We love them, love the WordPress community, and are always happy to see our friends and meet new WordPressers at the events.
For years, we have been talking about bringing WordCamp to Sacramento among ourselves and with others involved with the WordPress Meetup in Sacramento. Almost a year ago, I started calling locations, trying to secure a venue, and it’s thrilling to finally see it coming to fruition, to be part of the organizing team, and to have Bourn Creative as a sponsor.
WordCamp Sacramento wouldn’t be happening without the volunteer organizing team.
As WordPress enthusiasts, co-organizers of the Sacramento WordPress meetup, and agency owners, Brian and I are proud to be organizers of the inaugural Sacramento WordCamp, alongside Bill Mead, Heather Hogan, Jake Goldman, Joe Boydston, and students Jen Meyer, and Emily Buonauro.
The website content had been updated, the ticket registration form had been created and tested successfully, reminders were posted to Twitter and Facebook, a blog post was published, an email was sent to the email list, and the clock was counting down. Brian’s stomach was in knots. I almost felt sick. In just a couple minutes, we were going to flip the switch on the WordCamp Sacramento 2015 website and put tickets for sale.
The clock hit 10:00 am, we updated the page with 150 tickets available for purchase, and quickly published tickets now on sale announcements that went out via social media, email, and the meetup list. Then we held our breaths.
I knew tickets would sell, but still we were sitting there, looking anxiously at our computer screens, freaking out, and hoping please, oh please. I hope people buy tickets and it isn’t just crickets. I was sweating. — I’m not kidding.
Then it started happening. In the first two minutes six tickets were purchased! I was happy, thrilled, elated. Five minutes later, I was giddy. My stomach was doing flip-flops and Brian and I were high-fiving in my office, as 63 tickets were already gone. Watching the tickets fly off the virtual shelf was exciting — I couldn’t look away and neither could Brian. Adrenaline was pumping through our systems and with each ticket sale it pumped faster.
We knew at that point, nothing else would get done until the tickets were gone.
In only 30 minutes, 80 tickets were gone. They were getting snatched up like free WordPress t-shirts at WordCamp! By 11:30 am only 11 tickets of 150 were left. Then finally at 12:20 the last ticket was purchased and I could finally relax!
I am so excited to share that WordCamp is finally coming to Sacramento, California’s beautiful capitol city! WordCamp Sacramento 2015 will be happening on Saturday, November 7, 2015 at The Art Institute of California — Sacramento.
WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress, the free and open source personal publishing software that powers over 75 million sites on the web. They are attended by a wide range of people, including designers, developers, business owners, bloggers, consultants, and anyone who uses WordPress in any way — from newbies to the advanced.
Brian and I have attended many WordCamps, multiple years in a row, including WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp San Francisco, WordCamp Seattle, WordCamp Orange County, WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Reno, and WordCamp Los Angeles.
The Sacramento WordPress Community has been working to host a WordCamp in the state Capitol for quite a while, and as co-organizers of the Sacramento WordPress Meetup Group, Brian and I have been champions for the event and are thrilled to be part of an awesome team of organizers who are volunteering time, resources, and energy to make WordCamp Sacramento happen.
Recently, I joined the WP Watercooler crew along with my fellow Genesis recommended developers for a discussion about using the StudioPress Genesis Framework for your WordPress website — and of course we all shared why we use the framework and what we like about it.
While the episode is heavy in back and forth banter, we do cover some key things that you should know if you’re considering using the Genesis Framework as the foundation for your WordPress website.
I jumped in and shared that calling it a framework is really a misnomer. Genesis is just a parent theme. It’s no different than using the 2015 WordPress theme and building a child theme on it. The Genesis Framework is a toolbox for building child themes that gives you a consistent output of HTML markup and a standardized style sheet to work from.
I also pointed out that while calling it framework is great for StudioPress’s marketing efforts, it does cause confusion and misunderstandings in the larger WordPress community about how it works.
A coordinated plugin update occurred Monday morning between many popular WordPress plugins to address a common security vulnerability that allows for XSS cross-site scripting attacks.
Post Status published a great article explaining the security vulnerability, and Yoast published a post explaining the backstory.
The exact number of plugins affected is unknown, but a number of the most popular WordPress plugins are affected, and millions of websites are vulnerable due to this issue. Jetpack and Yoast’s WordPress SEO alone are active on well over a million websites.
Sucuri has identified a minimum of fifteen plugins affected, but they have only looked into the top 300-400 and others that were notable.
The gauntlet has been thrown. On February 26, 2015, Google affirmed their position on the importance of mobile-friendliness and it’s affect on your mobile search rankings.
Google originally warned us of this change back in November in the post Helping users find mobile-friendly pages, on their Webmaster Central Blog.
In the post, they point out how terrible the experience is when visiting a non-mobile site on a mobile device and you have to pinch and zoom and scroll sideways to see the all of the content, or you can’t click any of the tiny links or menu items with your gigantic fingers.
We began to see hints of this coming back in November 2014, when mobile search results began displaying a “mobile-friendly” label in their search results — and we saw it displayed on our own listed in mobile search results.
I’m sure at some point you’ve heard the phrase, the shoemaker’s kids have no shoes. You may have even used it yourself. The silly phrase is often thrown around in jest, but never is it so prevalent as in the web design and web development worlds.
Designers and developers are the worst culprits of doing amazing work for clients, but never making time to do amazing work for themselves — and we’re often no different.
At Bourn Creative, we always operate with a full client roster, and that means client work and pending client deadlines always come first. Sometimes we go months, and even a few times, over a year between portfolio updates and refinements or revisions to our own website. But, this past week, we did make some time to update some things!
Below are just a few projects we have worked on recently:
