Other Uses For WordPress?

Good morning and happy Monday.

Busy week ahead… starting off with a call in about an hour with a new developer I have hired part-time to kick things off. He’s coming aboard to help increase speed of delivery for Concierge clients on projects.

So, for my Concierge clients, you might start to see a new name showing up inside of Basecamp.

I do find it rather ironic, though. After multiple years of doing almost exclusively digital courses and memberships here at the Blog Marketing Academy… and shying away from hands-on work…. now I’m hiring somebody specifically for that kind of client work.

I pivoted to client services in 2022. Slowly at first. But, now, it is most of what happens around here. I’m liking it, too.

Anyway, let’s light this candle, shall we?

Below…

• Other uses for WordPress? (you know, besides the usual public website)
• A look at what’s going on with Concierge
• Mistakes I see people making when building their contact forms

So, let’s dive in…

Other Uses For WordPress?

So, we all know WordPress for blogs and websites. These days, most of us now use WordPress for ecommerce stores, membership sites and more.

After all, WordPress has 43% market share so it is – by far – the most popular content management system that exists.

But, WordPress is a platform. And it can be used for different things. Things you might not have thought of.

Yes, it is for building websites. However, not all websites need to be used for the same purpose.

Case in point…

I have just hired a new developer to assist with client projects for Concierge. This move brings up a very important point that I’ve been way too relaxed about: documentation.

Company documentation is boring. But, any business that wants to expand past it’s founder has to develop systems and document them. And I’m now back in that position and facing the project of documenting things properly.

But, where do I store it?

Businesses often come up with all kinds of different solutions for this. Some use old-school documents and put those things into a folder structure on an intranet. Some use Google services. Some liked to use tools like Notion and others.

I looked at those options. But, I quickly realized I didn’t want to waste time learning a new tool. I KNOW WordPress!

So, why not set up a private website just for documentation? That’s what I decided to do.

Basically, I’m setting up a private membership site that will have a knowledgebase to serve as documents. I can make it look however I want. The user profiles will all be people who work for me. And I just use something like the Force Login plugin to enforce logins. A simple, free plugin that locks the entire site down and requires login to view anything at all.

What uses might you have for WordPress that aren’t typical?

• Your own private documentation for your business?
• A personal journal?
• A private collaboration area for a team by installing something like BuddyBoss or BBPress?
• A private notes repository?

Basically, anything you can make WordPress do using it’s organizational capabilities for content or any plugins…. can also be used in a private setting for purposes other than a public website.

Heck, you could even install WordPress locally on your own computer by using something like Local or the new Studio tool.

And remember, too…

When you use WordPress, it is a platform you own and control. You can make it do whatever you want. You own all the data. That’s true digital sovereignty.

Not everything needs to use some third-party tool.

This Week In Concierge

Last week, I pulled the trigger on hiring a new developer to help move client projects along faster and assist with Concierge. He starts today and, in fact, I will be holding a kick-off call with him shortly after this newsletter goes out.

His name is William. He has about 7 years of experience with WordPress and just graduated with a Masters degree in Information Technology. While he’s done quite a bit, he still has to learn some of the tools I use for clients. There will be a ramp-up process. But, Concierge clients will begin to see a new name floating around inside of Basecamp.

Some of what we’ve been working on last week is:

• Helped a client (via a couple of Zoom calls) integrate MailerLite and BeeHiiv together so that the email lists mirror between the two platforms
• Went live and tweaked a client’s new Kadence-powered website that I finished building for her the week prior
• Major headway on converting a client’s larger membership out of a heavily Elementor-built site over to a leaner Kadence design. Getting them ready for launch!
• Loads of changes and a slick new “access denied” system using WP Fusion and Kadence Elements…. so “access denied” delivers nice, marketing-centric, and contextual calls to action
• Repairing (basically re-building) a client’s contact form that stopped working properly and had email delivery issues
• Fixed a client’s non-working Gravity form.
• Migrated a new client to Rocket and performed a performance optimization

One thing I’ve been doing more is implementing aspects of client projects in realtime over a Zoom session. I either do it and let them watch over my shoulder and learn how it is done… or I watch them do it and guide them and speed up the process. I may actually make this a more official offer. Maybe call it an “Implementation Session” instead of a “Strategy Call”. Kind of helps with scheduling, too.

Likely to do that. Anytime Credits will be used for Implementation Sessions, too. Click here to add credits to your account.

WordPress Quick Bits

Thrive Themes Held A “Sale”. Under it’s new ownership, Thrive is doing things they never used to do. They offered a “up to 60%” discount sale. But, get this… while Thrive Suite used to cost $299/year back when I was a fan, they’ve now made it cost $799/year! And, with the “discount”, it is now $399/year. But, it will be billed at the full rate. They make that fact hard to see. Oh and… it isn’t really a discount despite the sales emails and the countdown timer. Because… the same deal is always there. In fact, the sale was supposed to expire last week and, sure enough, I just checked and it is still there. So sad to see what has happened to Thrive Themes.

WP Admin in Dark Mode? Seems like “Dark mode” on your computer is all the rage. And heck, I tend to prefer it myself most of the time. Well now, you can do it with the WordPress admin panel using the Ultimate Dashboard plugin. They now offer dark mode as an option if you want the panel to look slick.

PerfMatters Now Does Minification. PerfMatters is my go-to performance plugin for WordPress, but I always thought it was a little strange that it couldn’t minify javascript or CSS. Not a big deal, but that’s something other plugins usually do. Well, as of 2.3.1, now PerfMatters does, too. If you’re not familiar, to “minify” just means to take all the white space and extra characters out of a bunch of text. So, basically, PerfMatters can now reduce the unneeded bloat from your JS and CSS files and speed things up further. And it offers exceptions so as not to break anything. Check out the changelog here.

WordPress 6.5.5 Pushed Out. A lot of you were probably auto-updated to WordPress 6.5.5 last week. This one fixes 3 security problems. If your site hasn’t been updated yet, I suggest you take care of it.

xCloud Hosting Offers Lifetime Deal. While I lean in on Rocket.net for my hosting and for most client sites, I do host about 30 sites with xCloud. I did a review of xCloud closer to when it first launched. xCloud is offering a limited-time lifetime deal on their panel. You can host up to 5 servers in your account and use the panel itself forever. Pretty good deal. I have a lifetime account with them and use it all the time. Check it out.

The Way To Build Your Site’s Forms (And What To Avoid)

So, last week, I had to deal with a few forms on behalf of clients. And one thing that is super common – especially on membership sites – is forms.

There are two big mistakes I see people make with their forms:

• Use some low-quality free plugin or something like Contact Form 7 to build their forms.
• Use their page builder to build forms.

Now, Contact Form 7 is a crappy forms plugin. No idea why so many people use it. Horrible interface. Geeky as hell to use. And a big spam magnet. Please… stop using Contact Form 7 if you’re still using it. There are much better options.

Now, using a page builder to make your forms isn’t the best idea either. Most of them offer the capability. In recent weeks, I’d had to deal with forms built with Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, Elementor and many others. Even Kadence has a fairly nice form builder. Lots of options. But…

I wouldn’t recommend you use them. And here’s why…

These tools are not purpose-built for forms. Instead, they are built into much larger builders and the forms themselves are not a primary focus.

Not only that, each of these forms are standalone on the individual pages they were built on. In other words, there’s no central interface where you can view and manage all of your forms in one spot. Instead, to modify or manage the form, you open up the page it is sitting on in your editor.

If the only thing you need is one single contact form, then maybe you can use your site editor to build it. As long as it does what you need and doesn’t turn into a big spam magnet, it could work.

But, for more involved needs, you shouldn’t do it that way. Use a dedicated forms plugin.

By far, my top recommendation for this is Fluent Forms. I’ve used a lot of them and I find Fluent Forms to be easy to use, highly capable, integrates with a ton of things, and extremely cost effective.

Gravity Forms is also good. I just think Fluent Forms is cleaner and a better investment. The Gravity licensing and add-ons can get rather expensive.

WP Forms? No. The company (Awesome Motive) is known for some questionable tactics and I think their plugins are best avoided unless you want your WordPress admin panel to turn into one big ad.

Forminator? Ninja Forms? JetFormBuilder? Formidable? There are a ton of these things. But, outside of pretty rare and specific use cases, I think Fluent Forms is the way to go.

The free version works great. If you need fancier features, the PRO version is quite affordable and more cost effective.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.