November 2014

This talk was given at WordCamp DFW by Kirk Bowman of The Art of Value. It puts forward a ton of practical steps to help you move from hourly billing (which creates a conflict between you and your customer) to value-based pricing. As a side note, the projector happened to not be working, so the talk included lots of descriptions of what would have been completely visual material if the slides had been available at the time.

If you’re interested in learning more about value-based pricing, there’s also a podcast at The Art of Value that is devoted to the topic.

This talk was given as part of a series of lightning talks at WordCamp San Francisco. Lightning talks were grouped in threes, and dealt with a particular topic, with each presenter spending five minutes elaborating on the theme that tied the session together. The above talk was given by Jennifer Bourn, who has also provided the slides and some deeper thoughts to go along with them.

Most of what’s covered here applies just as much to developers and implementers as it does to designers. We have to approach it a little differently, (we as developers, for example, can’t just tell our clients that this is bad code and shouldn’t be used, even though that is a factor), but these are still good principles to use when communicating with clients so that projects go smoothly and everybody is satisfied with the final outcome.

Code For The People is a six-person WordPress development agency based in the UK, known for their great service and the enterprise tools they’ve created. Automattic has acquired them and will be winding down the consulting part of their business as they join the WordPress.com VIP team to continue building the best tools and services for enterprises using WordPress.

Code for the People brings some unique qualities to the Automattic table, like developing WordPress solutions for government agencies and doing a lot of work on the multilingual front. They’re responsible for the development of Babbel.

Code For The People is coming to Automattic with a strong enterprise track record: it has already helped to build out sites for companies like IPC Media, which runs some 30 publications on WordPress; the Rolling Stones, and government agencies. The co-founders have a long history themselves of working not just in WordPress but also enterprises. Before starting Code For The People they cut their teeth at a range of businesses, including government organizations, to help them build sites. That expertise, and familiarity with the community of people working in those kinds of businesses today, will come in handy as this becomes an increasing focus for Automattic as it looks to grow its revenues.

“We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the web.” — David Fleck, general manager of advertising at Disqus. Translation: We’re tracking everyone who visits a website with Disqus enabled and building a profile of them based on the content of the sites they visit and any comments they leave. “Deeper” than Facebook.

“So I’m particularly excited to announce that we’re bringing our native advertising product, Sponsored Comments, to the world of programmatic and we’re doing it on a global basis. […] Starting today, Xaxis clients, which include some of the best brands in the world, will buy and place Sponsored Comments advertising across much of the Disqus network.” Translation: It’s not comment spam if we’re getting paid for it.

The only thing that’s surprising about this is how long it took for sponsored comments to happen. One more reminder that if a service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product.

Via Matt

I was talking to my Mom while I was at WordCamp San Francisco, trying to explain what WordCamp and WordPress are in non-technical terms. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that not everybody’s a nerd. Here’s a non-tech wrap-up of what WordCamp is, and what WordPress is. This recap focuses more on the blogging track that took place on Sunday but gives a good overview of the whole thing.