Tagged: wordpress

  1. The WordPress Happiness Bar at SXSW The WordPress Happiness Bar at SXSW

    The WordPress Happiness Bar at SXSW

  2. Facebook apps for Cobec

    We recently did a complete rebranding project for our client Cobec, which included not only a new website driven by WordPress, but also a couple of Facebook apps.

    The requirements were fairly simple—two tabs on the Cobec Facebook page: “What We Do” and “Careers” (you can see the final result in the first image below). To start, I registered myself on Facebook with my work email address and created a Cobec test page so I didn’t risk mucking with the client’s page while developing and testing. Creating the apps themselves was a little tricky because I had never done any FB development before, but once I got the hang of the functionality in developers.facebook.com, it wasn’t too bad. These apps basically just display an external web page in Facebook’s content area through the use of an iFrame. The bulk of the work in Facebook is registering the apps, pointing them to the proper external URLs, and then adding the apps to a page.

    One of the requirements for the apps was that they reuse content from Cobec’s website. Since the website was built in WordPress, creating the FB app pages and reusing content was as simple as copying the WP theme from the main site to a new theme folder and restyling the site with a fixed width to match Facebook’s iFrame. You may at this point be asking yourself how I got the Facebook apps to use the theme for FB instead of the website theme, which is an issue I wrote about recently. Click here if you are curious how that was handled.

    You can check out Cobec’s Facebook page here.

    The same content on the Cobec website:

    Posted by Brian Chenault, developer for Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr or Twitter.

  3. No is the most strategic decision you have at your disposal as an entrepreneur.

    -

    Michael Alter: The Importance of Saying No

    When you are in the business of helping others increase their presence online, it’s easy to say “yes” to any task related to that goal. However, some of these requests are not in line with our company focus. I’ve had a tough time saying “no” over the years, but I’ve gotten better at it. Now when we are asked to perform a task that is not one of our core services but related to our overall mission, I ask myself two questions:

    1. Is it a service that we are interested in growing into a line of business?

    When I first started Business Bullpen I thought we needed to offer web hosting as a reseller. I determined it would make things easier on our clients to “just take care” of hosting even though it wasn’t a service I had any interest in making into a business. I also thought it was an easy upsell for something that we could easily maintain. I was wrong. While handling hosting as a reseller for a couple clients is no problem, building an infrastructure to support tens to hundreds of clients is not, especially when you aren’t interested in making it a business. After a couple years, we decided to stop reselling web hosting. At first, it was a little difficult to say “no, we don’t offer that.” It’s always tough to decline more money, but in the end we were saving money by saying “no.” In addition, our clients were getting a better service and a better deal.

    2. Do we want to be known for that service?

    We’ve been designing custom WordPress themes for clients over the last four years. Since the WordPress name is well-known, we receive a wide variety of requests for WordPress work. However, some of those requests are not for the development of a custom theme or plugin. For example, they range from modifying existing/third-party themes to researching, recommending, and installing third-party plugins to tweaking third-party code. We don’t want to be known for that. We want to work with clients who need unique, custom websites or applications and support these clients as their presence and site grows.

    Over the years, though, we have said “yes” to these other WordPress requests. Why? Because we think they are simple and small in scope. We also treat them as “one-off” requests. The truth is that they are never as easy as we think, and they aren’t “one-off” requests. The more we do outside of our focus, the more we become known for delivering services that we don’t want to be known for. As a result, we get more calls and emails asking us to do the work we don’t want to be known for.

    This is the situation we have been dealing with WordPress over the past couple of years. Just like it took us a couple years to “close” our hosting reselling service, it finally took us a couple years to begin saying “no” to WordPress requests that we don’t want to be known for. It’s not going to be easy, but taking the easy way out is in fact never that.

    Posted by Todd Wickersty. Todd is the founder and co-owner of Business Bullpen. You can follow Todd on Tumblr or Twitter.