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!
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!
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.
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.
When you publish a new blog post, it is displayed at the top of your main blog page, pushing your older posts down the page. As more posts are published, old posts keep moving down the page until they no longer appear on the main blog page.
These older posts are still available if you click through pages of older posts, or if you click on an archive page link. For example, all posts in Category A are also available in the Category A archive.
In your WordPress site, you’ll have a few different types of archive pages available, including:
A WordPress website is made up of a combination of files, software, theme templates, add-on code (plugins), settings, and content and images stored in a database — that all fit together like the pieces of a puzzle to generate the final web pages on your site.
A WordPress theme can use just a couple templates or many templates, including custom templates, depending on the needs of the site it is being created for.
Outlined below are the most common templates found in WordPress themes, along with a sample of one of the basic custom page templates we add to every theme.
A widget is a general term used when referencing a small gadget or mechanical device that has an unknown or unspecified name. So, a WordPress widget is the term used to describe a small area on a website that is used for a specific function.
What that means in plain English, is that:
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple and easy way to give more control to the website owner over the design and content, and today they are used to add specific types of content and features to a site.
In fact, according to Matt Mullenweg in his State of The Word 2013 address, 69% of those whom use WordPress use is only as a content management system for their website, not as a blog.
The primary content region on a WordPress site is referred to as the content area. It can contain all different types of content, from text and images, to video and audio. The content area is where the primary web page content or blog post content that you write is added and formatted.
NOTE: Even though content can also be put in a sidebar or in a footer, content in those areas are put into widgets, so they have different names such as, sidebar widget area, footer Widget area, Home page widget area, after-post widget area, etc.
A website sidebar is a vertical column or vertical bar of supplemental content that is displayed alongside the main content region of a page.
In the old days of the web, most websites used a sidebar/content layout, with the sidebar running down the left side of the web page and the content on the right side of the web page. But today the most common website page layout is a content/sidebar layout, where the content is on the left side of the web page and the sidebar runs down the right side of the web page.
Depending on the theme design, your WordPress website could include different page templates, different layout options, and multiple sidebars, including:
With the recent release of WordPress 3.9, several new features for theme developers were introduced to further enhance what can be baked into new WordPress themes. Devin Price has a great post over at wptheming highlighting many of the new features. The inspiration for the Genesis specific filter below came from his post.
One reason we design and build WordPress themes on the Genesis Framework is the nature in which it is built. With Genesis, I have the ability to add, filter, or remove almost everything.
Up until WordPress 3.9, the Genesis blog and archive page templates were inherited by child themes and there wasn’t a simple way to remove them. Why does this matter? When we build custom child themes for clients, we use a variety functions to remove every unnecessary item and option from Genesis to create a simplified and focused back-end for our clients.
A footer is the bottom section of a website, usually appearing on all pages throughout the site.
The most common use of a footer is a bar across the bottom of the page that includes the copyright information, and links to the privacy policy and disclaimer pages. Depending on the focus and design of your website, this area may also include your contact information and links to pages such as an affiliate page, a sponsors page, an advertising page, or even the contact page.
A footer widget area is the section above the footer that includes widgets (also referred by users as “boxes”) for content.
Typically the footer widget area is set apart from the rest of the content, either with a colored background, or a line or divider of some type. And, in many cases, they appear on almost every page of the website.
The number of widgets or content “boxes” in a footer widget area is determined by the design of the theme. Theme footer widget areas can contain one, two, three, or even four widget areas (or more) — and while many themes use three or four widgets that are all the same size, they don’t have to be the same size in width or height.
At the most basic level, a WordPress menu is a collection or list of links. The most common placement of a menu is in the site navigation area or navigation bar and is referred to as a navigation menu.
Each link in a menu is called a menu item. Some menu items may have sub-menu items that are displayed in a drop down menu.
Below you’ll see a site with a primary navigation menu, a secondary header menu, and a drop down menu of sub pages under the Assessments menu item.
A website header is the area is one of the most valuable areas of your website. It runs across the top of the page and appears on every page of your website, except on sales or landing pages templates that have it removed.
The purpose of your website header is to promote your brand and make your site instantly recognizable to those who are already familiar with you. For many businesses, the header is the perfect place to efficiently and effectively convey exactly what your site is about and what your business does.
