Category: Articles (Page 199 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

The Dangers of Pricing in WordPress Business Models

April 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the business models that is common (although not as common as it used to be) in the economy of WordPress is the unlimited support for for a single purchase. That is, you buy a theme or a plugin, and you pay for the product and the purchase often includes a license for lifetime support.

For those of you who have made a similar purchase, then you’ve likely seen some type of pricing defined like this:

$X for the purchase of the product
Use the product on Y number of domains
Unlimited support and updates

And then the above scheme is tiered such that X and Y change based on the amount of money paid toward the product.

But, like I said, this is nothing new and it’s something that we see frequently see, but anyone who has worked with this particular business or who followed this through to its inevitable conclusion realizes that this is a completely unsustainable business model.

To that end, if more small businesses based on WordPress want to have a better shot of “making it” (where “making it” is defined as staying in business – not some arbitrary amount of money to be made), then this particular pricing model needs to die.

The Difference Between Principles and Advice in Leadership

April 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I read a post on LinkedIn which has since been taken down (though thanks Google cache!). Though you can read the entire post in the linked, cached version of the page, a portion of the content can be found here:

I know I fired this person, but I considered that merely a technical matter. I thought we agreed it was the best option for all involved, allowing him to grow professionally elsewhere. It never crossed my mind that he had been FIRED. We just reached the end of our partnership, for now. Time to move on for both of us.

Emphasis mine.

When it comes to topics about running a business, leadership, team dynamics, and all of that, I leave that stuff to be covered elsewhere – this is not the blog for it; however, there are a couple of aspects of leadership and running a business that keep cropping up and that are of interest to me.

And since there are a many people who work in the WordPress Development Community are freelancers, self-employed, or have some type of entrepreneurial venture – be it full-time or part-time – it seems like it’s worth covering even if it’s just in a single post.

To be clear, it’s not that I’m an expert or even an authority on the topic.

Hardly.

But I, like many, have thoughts on some of the material that I read, and figured it may be worth sharing from time-to-time.

Regarding Our Efforts at Pragmatic Programming

April 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of programming comes in something as seemingly trivial as how to best name and organize files. And by that, I mean the process of figuring out what to name directories and files all the way down to how to best name classes, variables, and functions.

If it doesn’t sound trivial, then maybe it just sounds silly especially to those who are more experienced programmers.

Interestingly enough, this is a bit more of a challenge for some, but not so much for others. After all, isn’t this is where standards come in to play? That is to say, isn’t this where they help us make decisions on how to avoid problems just like this?

Sure, in some ways, but there are times in which standards may not cover all cases or certain aspects of what we’re trying to do.

So what then?

If I Knew Then What I Know Now (About Code Reviews)

April 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I draft posts, I normally don’t aim to write to any particular age group, demographic, or personality type – I generally just share my opinions on certain WordPress-related topics and/or development-related material.

But everyone mixes it up a little bit every now and then, right?

And so if I had to define a specific type person to whom this post is most relevant, it would be any one of the following:

Those who are just getting into software and/or web development,
Those who have been into development for a while but have yet to share code online,
And those who spend time critiquing others who are working to get better by publicly sharing code.

Maybe this is geared more towards the usual audience, but whatever the case: this is more of a retrospective post that I would have like to have read prior to where I am now.

Thoughts on WordPress Developers, Communities, and Products

April 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who are involved in working with building things for WordPress- specifically, premium plugins and themes – then you’re likely plugged closely into what many refer to as “the WordPress community.”

Granted, I’m not saying it’s not a community – it is – but it’s just part of the community, right? I mean, the word encompasses people who use WordPress to blog, people who are fans of the software, those who have contributed to it, those who build things with it, and so on.

All that to say, the community has a variety of facets.

And the challenge to this is that when we spend so much time with our subset of the community, it’s easy to accidentally develop a degree of tunnel vision such that we become at least partially focused on writing things, designing things, or buildings things with our part of the community in mind rather than our customers.