June 2, 2015/6 Comments/in /by

How Much Should a WordPress Website Really Cost to Make?

As a web developer you get that question quite often. My usual answer: what should a car cost? As with most things in life it depends…

Back in the halcyon days of the early web, developers were free to pluck pretty much whatever crazy price occurred to them out of the air and present it to their clients.

These days –  particularly at the entry level – pricing is becoming increasingly commodified and pressure is very much in the downward direction.

Working out how much you should be paying for a website remains a pain point for many small businesses though, as does finding someone reliable to build it for you in WordPress.

In this article we’ll tackle the question of how much a WordPress website should really cost, and what you need to know about pricing as a site owner to make sure you aren’t paying over the odds.

Let’s start with why you should pay someone to do this in the first place.

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May 6, 2015/4 Comments/in , , /by

How to Productize Your WordPress Theme Development Business (And Make More Money)

There is, as Shakespeare so memorably put it, a tide in the affairs of men. At a certain point in your life as a WordPress developer you will face a choice: do you saddle up and take the next step for you and your business or stay stuck at your current level?

Get it wrong and you risk stalling your career and getting locked into an endless cycle of bad clients, money worries, and grinding day-to-day dissatisfaction. But productizing your WordPress business is the way to avoid this sorry state of affairs.

In this article, we’ll cover why you need to productize, provide concrete steps to get you started on the right track and give you some useful pointers towards further resources for the future.

Let’s start with a quick definition.

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April 13, 2015/3 Comments/in /by

Growing your Business: 6 Lessons from Taking a Brand New Open Source Product from 0 to 500,000 downloads in 12 months

A guest post by Ghost founder John O’Nolan

Almost exactly two years ago I launched a small new open source blogging platform to the world. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would pan out. I had hopes, of course, but there’s always that moment of uncertainty right before a big launch that’s impossible to ignore.

Today, Ghost is one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world, and we’ve been very fortunate to grow to $411,000 in annual revenue within a very short space of time (You can check this out live on our public revenue dashboard) – with more than half a million downloads of the open source package.

Kriesi has very kindly invited me to do a guest post to share some of the key lessons behind that roller-coaster of a journey, so I’m going to try and touch on all the biggest wins (and failures) that we made in the last couple of years.

Enjoy!

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April 7, 2015/5 Comments/in , /by

3 Reasons Why Good Typography is Vital to Great Web Design (Plus 3 Important Tips)

We have all heard this cliché: “A picture is worth a thousand words”, but is it always true in the world of web design?

Many designers are visually-minded people, and it does of course make sense to have a good eye for color, form and proportion in this line of work. Although the rules of typography are taught in design schools, these principles often take second place when planning the psychological impact of a web-design. The focus is on the overall visual effect, and typography is sometimes added as an afterthought.

This is an oversight that could have a negative impact on the effectiveness of your work. With that in mind, in this post I am going to share three reasons why good typography is vital to great web design, and give you three tips for making the most of the power of typography.

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March 30, 2015/in /by

5 Reasons Why Responsive Design is More Important Today Than Ever

A key character trait shared by most successful businesses is adaptability.

Businesses that prosper in an ever-changing environment are the ones that know how to stay up-to-date with the latest developments, and how to change their way of interacting with their world to stay on top.

With that in mind, if you don’t have a responsive web platform to showcase your services and/or products, you’ve already been left behind.

According to comScore, smartphones and tablets now account for 60% of time spent online. That trend is set to continue, with mobile devices on the rise and desktop browsing continuing to dwindle.

Obviously more people prefer using an app than a laptop to access Facebook, book a flight, or browse an online marketplace. That is understandable, given the convenience of a pocket-size tool that offers many of the benefits of something ten times the size. The statistics can be confirmed by simply looking around and noticing how many people are constantly glued to their smartphones.

As early as 2008 the forecasts indicated the trend, and in 2014 it became reality. Responsive design is no longer a luxury or a ‘nice to have’, but a necessity. Here are five reasons why.

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November 11, 2013/8 Comments/in /by Kriesi

Playing to Win – How Video Games made me a better entrepreneur

I have always enjoyed playing video games. Probably a little too much, with a tendency to get addicted :) Street Fighter, Tekken, Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW,  just to name a few. I especially loved those games because they were easy to learn but difficult to master and provided great depth for those willing to put time and effort into the game. I can’t even tell how many hours I spent, practicing various combos in Tekken, analyzing replays in Starcraft, doing calculations for what would be the best equipment for my WoW character or just reading articles about improving myself as a player.

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