Small Business Success

This month’s WPToronto East meetup focused on small business. A recurring theme from our discussion was the importance of “content first”. That is, getting your page content ready before you start building a new website.

We took a peek at the new WordPress Websites product from GoDaddy, which uses a unique wizard to ask users about their business. Based on the information the user provides, the website is pre-loaded with placeholder pages and content.

We also looked at the upcoming release of WordPress 4.7. The new visual edit shortcuts in Customizer were well-received, as was the introduction of Post Templates. Developer notes can be found on the Make WordPress Core blog:

Twenty Seventeen, the new default theme for WordPress, will be shipping with WordPress 4.7. From WP Tavern:

Twenty Seventeen is the shot in the arm that WordPress needs to make it easy to set up a business website with a trusted, well-supported theme.

It’ll be interesting to see how small businesses put Twenty Seventeen to use, and how Twenty Seventeen will work alongside plugins like Beaver Builder.

Speaking of page builders…

Page Builders

We discussed “mega themes” for WordPress:

And page builder plugins:

Tool Recommendations

For locking down sites before they’re ready to go live:

Handling forms:

CRM & analytics:

IDEs for web development:

Editors:

Plugins:

Q&As

Some members came to the group with specific questions. Here’s what we talked about, including links to relevant sources:

Want to have a separate homepage and blog page?

  1. Create two pages, e.g. Home and Blog
  2. Update your Reading settings to use a Static homepage
  3. Use the Blog page for Posts

What are some good resources for brushing up on dev skills?

Does Jetpack support local site development?

Has the WordPress plugin review process changed?

Additional Notes

Thanks to Robin for putting these additional notes together.

Image credit: paulbr75 via Pixabay