Category: Oppinion and Commentary

When I was at WordCamp Tokyo, I was reminded of the power of a thank you and how it makes Open Source better.

Source: Say Thank You Publicly and Be a Better Coder

Mika’s post is the second one I’ve seen in the last few days lauding thankfulness as a virtue worth emulating, and which I’ve also taken seriously. Here’s the other one.

what I think both of these posts are getting at, even if they don’t mention it, is that “thank you” is part of being a good professional. It opens doors, and it lets others know your door is open. It also gets a lot done. Because while pay is important, it’s not, or shouldn’t be priority number one.

So if you’re a developer working with a designer, or vice versa, say thank you early and often. If you’ve hired someone to help with the accessibility of your website, whether free or paid, say thank you early and often. If you’ve hired someone to help you with your WordPress troubles, say thank you early and often. Because no matter how much you’re paying, thanks or the lack thereof will make the difference between whether or not you receive any help or guidance in the future. And if you’re not receiving guidance or help, you’re going to be traveling a very lonely road.

One of the greatest things about WordPress is that it has a very low barrier to entry. If you’re just starting out on the web, you have the ability to stand up a website with very little work. But that’s also one of its greatest drawbacks.

I’m not saying that someone should have to be a code wiz to create a personal blog to jot down their thoughts. But the flood of WYSIWYG warriors turned developers that has saturated the WordPress space is depressing.

Using a drag-and-drop page builder to create websites is not development.

Buying a stock theme, especially from ThemeForest, throwing it up on a web server with WordPress and making some configuration changes to create a website is not development.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for this sort of thing. there’s definitely a market for websites with zero customization necessary, and I believe they should be priced appropriately. But if you’re using one of these solutions to create websites, please don’t call yourself a developer.

First, it gives actual developers a bad name, especially when things break spectacularly down the line. And depending on the drag-and-drop solution used, things definitely will break. There’s only so far you can push drag-and-drop solutions until you get to the end of the line, and that line’s not very long.

And while I’m on the subject, could those of you in the WordPress space who create and sell these kinds of solutions please quit selling them as “Create amazing websites in minutes with no code required?” You’re cheapening WordPress, and web development as a whole, by doing this. That pitch also creates very low user expectations, which developers then have to manage.

I’m not saying you can’t offer any services whatsoever. there’s plenty of room for people who can put together simple websites for clients. You can even charge for it. But unless you are actually writing code that changes the way WordPress functions, either through a plugin or a theme, and you know what goes where in regard to plugins and themes, please don’t call yourself a developer.

Don’t call yourself a developer unti you’re familiar with how WordPress works inside and out, how it interacts with plugins and themes, and how it interacts with the rest of your stack. There are books that will help you get to that point, including WordPress: Professional Design and Development, and WordPress: Professional Plugin Development, both by Brad Williams.

Don’t call yourself a developer until you have at least working familiarity with how the rest of your stack works. There are books for that too. If you don’t like books, there are plenty of free resources online for both of these subjects.

And finally, don’t call yourself a developer until you’ve learned HTML, CSS, and then PHP, JavaScript, or some other scripting or programming language. HTML and CSS are the foundations of the web, and are built-upon in a lot of ways by the scripting and programming languages designed for the web.

Once you’ve learned all this, then you can call yourself a developer and offer the appropriate services along with implementation services and whatever else fits your skillset. But you do a disservice to yourself, your clients and the WordPress and web development communities by billing yourself as a developer when you’re not.

As of today, WordPress has achieved twenty-five percent marketshare. That means one out of every four websites is now powered by WordPress, and that’s not including the sites hosted at WordPress.com.

This makes me personally and professionally proud. I’ve been a very outspoken supporter of WordPress ever since I accidentally encountered it back in 2005, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It has provided me with benefits too numerous to count in both the personal and professional spheres, and I enjoy contributing to it as part of its accessibility team.

I like to think that, as WordPress’s marketshare grows, the potential for an accessible web grows. We’re not there yet in terms of WordPress accessibility. There’s still quite a bit of work to do on the project itself, and there’s still much more work to do when it comes to convincing the community of WordPress service providers that accessibility isn’t just an optional feature.

We’re getting closer though, and with each release, it becomes easier and easier to both build accessible websites with WordPress and to use WordPress with assistive technology. With WordPress venturing into the application framework space, it’s also becoming a less-daunting undertaking to build accessible applications, especially as alternatives to the popular applications which aren’t yet accessible and will likely not become so in the near future without a lot of effort.

So congratulations WordPress, (both the project and its surrounding community), for conquering the first twenty-five percent of the web. Fifty percent is now that much closer.

In the first live edition of "Ask Me Anything", going forward, to be referred to as "WPAMA", Michael from Evansville Indiana asks Amanda how to prevent crowding and overlapping of text, proper use of images, and optimizing the areas of a site built with WordPress, i.e., header right, navigation bar, footer area, etc. Amanda answers these questions in addition to explaining the return to minimalism, why sliders suck, and how site design changes almost yearly, just like fashion trends. But perhaps most useful, her suggestions for reaching out to the very helpful WordPress community to ask for help, especially for us blind implementers and designers who need to find those possessing the skills to provide greater attention to detail. This informative eight minute audio segment should provide something for everyone to take away to make your sites become even more cosmetic appealing, but most of all, highly functional and user friendly.

See Original Post: Ask Me Anything – Live Wednesdays at 8PM Eastern – Twitter HashTag #WPAMA

I like to spend New Year’s Day pondering the year that just left and cementing goals for the new one. Last year was both strange and wonderful for me. The one that’s just arrived seems so full of promise, and I want to capitalize on that. I usually do this kind of stock-taking privately, but this year I’m taking it public and bringing it over to the professional blog so that I have some accountability to go with the introspection. I think it’ll help with turning more goals into reality.

Goals Realized

2014 was actually pretty great considering (a)I didn’t do a lot of marketing, and (b) I spent two months out of action while dealing with what turned out to be Bell’s palsy. I started out the year with some theme customizations, and I also filed the paperwork to create the company that is Customer Servant Consultancy. This is a huge achievement for me, because in my mind it lends some legitimacy to what I’ve been doing full time for the last five years; Working with WordPress. I’ve also conducted two successful semesters of the WordPress course through the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired. In September, I got serious about my business hosting and moved all sites over to WPEngine so I no longer need to worry about site performance or my own security or whether or not things will scale when I add new services or features to the site.

The next big achievement for me last year was going to WordCamp San Francisco. This one’s been on the bucket list ever since WordCamp first started happening. But it was also a huge achievement because I almost didn’t get on that plane. The day before while I was getting ready to leave, I had a serious case of Impostor Syndrome, and I was convinced that I would meet all the WordPress people I interact with online, and some I don’t but look up to, and they’d all figure out that I have no idea what I’m talking about and that I’ve spent the last sixteen years faking my way through web technologies and accessibility, and the last ten years faking my way through WordPress and leading everyone down a path ending in catastrophy, all while playing the blind card. So I muddled my way through packing and didn’t sleep because I was also afraid I’d sleep in and miss the plane. Yeah, completely irrational. The trip was amazing though, and I met all sorts of great people who influence me in ways too numerous to count. I of course learned a lot, both during the camp and the summit and contributor days afterwords, tried new beer, (come on, everybody knows no year is complete without at least one new beer), and cemented the connections I have online with three-dimentional ones.

I’ve also made some stronger connections within the Genesis community which I think are professionally promising. Which leads me to my goals for 2015.

Looking Forward

Passive Income

Affiliate Marketing

In 2014, I started dabbling in affiliate marketing, and made a few sales. In 2015, my goal as far as that’s concerned is to make affiliate marketing part of my overall passive income strategy. My strategy has four pillars: Support at three varying levels, maintenance at three varying levels, affiliate marketing as part of the content I write for this site, and courses, which I’ll touch on in a bit. A note about affiliate marketing: Yes, I’m going to sell. No, I’m not going to be a douche about it. I will continue to write tutorials for the sake of teaching people how to do new things. But I’m going to be a little more aggressive about adding affiliate links as part of the linky goodness. There are some specific products I use on a regular basis, and as long as I’m writing about them and spreading the word, I may as well earn a little from it. Plus, twenty percent of all commissions from affiliate links will go to support the NVAccess Foundation, which develops a free and open-source screen reader for the blind.

Courses

Regarding courses, there are two planned for now: How to clean up a hacked WordPress site accessibly, which is scheduled to land in February, and a course on making Genesis child themes accessible, which is scheduled to land in May. Both of these will be pre-recorded with notes and appropriate exercises with grading and everything.

Self-Promotion

I also have a few goals that are related to getting noticed/self-promotion. First, I’ll be co-hosting a podcast on WordPress that reaches out to those outside the WordPress community who have accessibility concerns. I’ll be hosting that with Laura Legendary of elegant Insights, and Elle Waters of Simply Accessible. The podcast will run on the Cool Blind Tech network, as well as being archived here. I can’t speak for the other two co-hosts, but my goal with the podcast is to demonstrate that there’s a lot more you can do with WordPress than just run a blog, and that you can do most of it with very little sighted help.

Speaking of podcasts, related goals for 2015 include co-hosting Genesis office Hours, as well as the Dradcast. I listen to several podcasts on various topics, but these are the two I try to make it a point not to miss.

Getting Listed on the WordPress Credits Page

I love contributing to the wordPress project. Up until this year, I’ve been doing that in the forms of testing and providing tips to other developers as part of the Accessibility Team, as well as answering questions in the WordPress and Genesis support forums. I will continue to do both of these. But I also want to start sharing the code I write on both GitHub as well as here, and I also want to start submitting patches to tickets I test. I benefit from the code snippets shared by others, and I appreciate their sharing of said snippets. But I often have to modify them so that the output they generate is accessible. That is not a stab at developers/designers. and why is a discussion for a later post. But during this year, I’d like to start contributing those modified code snippets back to the community. This will take some adjustment to my workflow. It’s not that I’m purposely stingy with code, I just write the code to solve a particular problem I’m having and then stash it away for later use if necessary. This benefits me and the people I work with, but I think it could also benefit the wider community.

I also plan to continue working with Slack to improve the accessibility of their product. I have a few things to test currently, and will be making steps throughout this year to make that relationship a closer one, without being creepy, of course.

Then there’s the WordSesh Transcription project. I haven’t forgotten about this, and have started transcribing the first talk. But I’m changing up the workflow on this so I can spend an hour transcribing instead of trying to knock it out in one sitting. I have twenty-five minutes left to go in the first talk, and after transcribing I will finish the editing and post it.

These are my concrete goals for 2015. As you can see, I’ve got a ton of work to do. But I think as long as I take these goals in small, bite-sized chunks, with a lot of self-examination thrown in to ensure that I’m staying on track, I can achieve them by the end of 2015. I wish everyone success in whatever they’re trying to do in 2015, and I sincerely hope this is a great year for everyone.