My iPhone, laptop, even a new air purifier I recently purchased all had the option to buy some form of a maintenance plan. I’ve never regretted purchasing one because while I’d like to think of myself as responsible, I’m far from graceful. Working in the tech industry now as the Director of Client Strategy at WDS, I’m often asked whether or not an ongoing website maintenance and support plan for a website is necessary. My answer is always the same, “Absolutely.”

I understand being hesitant to engage in this extra expense. I’ll be the first to admit that YouTube tutorials, online classes, and documentation have me believing that I’m an expert developer at times; and while these tools are helpful, they don’t always account for the unexpected. There are many reasons why ongoing support is critical but let me just share a few.

Plugin, Theme, and WordPress Updates

All of the code that goes into making WordPress work is often referred to as the “core.” WordPress sends out updates a few times a year to ensure that the core is always in tip-top shape. Some releases are small, but some are important, containing things like critical security updates. Every update is worth taking seriously.

Plugins are created by this amazing open source community to extend the functionality of your website. Plugins can update more or less frequently depending on how engaged the developer is in improving the tool.

There’s also your website theme to think about. Whether you’re using a free or premium one, chances are that as WordPress releases new updates, so will your theme.

I hesitate to hit that “update” button sometimes. You don’t always know how your website will be affected. While most agencies develop websites to be as update-proof as possible, there are no guarantees. Having a professional on deck to handle these updates for you is critical in the ultimate performance and health of your website.

Security

Hacking: it’s a term we are all familiar with. A quick look at the news and there is a story of some website being hacked somewhere. There are numerous measures you can take to protect your website. Some are easy and could merely require a plugin, but others tend to be a bit more complex. With ongoing support, trusted professionals will ensure the health of your website. One thing you may want to consider is if your website is being monitored on a regular basis. Constant security scans alert the website owner if a file has been tampered with, if there are irregular logins, or even if there have been DNS changes. Regular monitoring can detect if these changes are out of the ordinary and quickly put things back to normal.

Backups

Here is a typical scenario—you hire someone new to work on your website. It could be a new developer or maybe someone just adding content. They are given more access than they need, and accidentally something happens, and your site is not looking like it should. If you have regular backups being performed on your website, restoring to the last one should be a painless process. Without backups, you are in for a ton of investigation and work. Having regularly scheduled backups is the insurance policy you need most.

Big and Small Changes

The real hero of a maintenance and support plan us simply having access to a team of experts available to help. That form you want to add to the website, those images that you just haven’t had a chance to upload, the new ads you want to put on the homepage; with a support team, it’s as simple as letting them know your plans and then allowing them to take it from there. Think of your support team as an extension of your business. They are here to support you. No task is too small or large.

This may seem like a lot, and it is. There is no need to tackle all of this yourself. That’s why WDS has Maintainn. At Maintainn, a brilliant team of support specialists is there to answer your questions, help plan for changes, secure your website, back it up regularly, and update it consistently. All of this is to ensure you have a high performant and rock-solid website. Not only does this bring you peace of mind but it also assures your visitors are enjoying their experience. Yeah, there may be some additional investment, but it can’t compare to the investment needed if these safeguards are not in place.

The post Ongoing Website Maintenance: Why the Transition from WDS to Maintainn Makes Sense appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Earlier this summer when we launched the redesign for Maintainn.com, the ongoing website maintenance arm of WebDevStudios, we were really focused on making things less complicated for our clients. You can read on our Maintainn blog about some of the behind-the-scenes work we did to make the signup process for support services easier than ever. Next, we wanted to make contacting our team simpler, too. For us, the answer was live chat.

Live chat is a tricky business solution and isn’t something I would suggest jumping into without some careful consideration first. The most important aspect of any contact method is your ability to remain consistently reliable. For example, with a contact form, a response to a user’s question in one to two days is reasonable. With a phone call, picking up immediately or returning a voicemail hours later is perfectly acceptable. But with live chat, somebody must be available at the exact moment your visitors are visiting your website.

Instant Gratification and Other Benefits

Many times when visitors use the live chat feature, it’s because they’re looking for information to help them make a decision. The ability to provide that visitor with the answer they need immediately could easily be the difference between closing the sale or watching them head over to your competitor’s website.

Live chat is also an opportunity for you to build confidence with your customers. I’ve had multiple people send a chat request simply to verify our authenticity.

“I just wanted to see if I’d be able to reach a real person,” they explain. When they see that they can, in fact, reach a real person, I know that I’ve captured their trust. I’m not a bot, but rather, someone on which they can rely.

One thing to note: you don’t have to keep your live chat available 24 hours, seven days a week. We don’t. The Maintainn live chat option is only available during our normal business hours. We have it automated to open and close at specific hours on specified days.

The part that I didn’t expect to encounter when we set up live chat was how much we would learn about our own website. When a visitor is asking a question, it likely means that the answer they are seeking isn’t easily found on your website. Or, if you find yourself thinking, “The answer is RIGHT THERE,” this may be a perfect opportunity to reevaluate how your business, service, and product information are displayed. Perhaps it isn’t as clear and obvious as you think it is. Take what you learn from your live chat customers and apply it toward improving your website.

Selecting a Solution

While there are a number of live chat services available, finding one that fits your workflow is imperative. Some require you to be logged into their website where the chats take place in a web browser. Others offer mobile apps that allow you to answer chats even while you’re away from your desk.

There are also a number of WordPress plugins available for adding live chat to your website. Some of them are companion plugins associated with third-party services, while others are standalone.

As a distributed company, WebDevStudios (including the team at Maintainn) relies heavily on Slack for company communications and internal organization. So, as we searched for a live chat solution, we discovered Chatlio.

As the official live chat app fully integrated with Slack, Chatlio allows me to provide Maintainn website visitors with the customer service they seek without additional browser tabs open or software. Providing live chat support is just one of my job roles. I still need to be able to make sales calls, work on project proposals, and complete other tasks daily. Chatlio provides me with a way to multitask.

Chatlio may not be the answer for you. But if you invest the time in researching your options and trying a couple out, I’m sure you’ll find a live chat resource that fits your need.

In Summary

Simply stated, live chat is another great opportunity to connect with your visitors and provide them with a way to get a hold of you. It’s a way for you to build trust while answering their questions on the spot. Plus, you will learn about ways to improve and strengthen your website.

It may seem a bit intimidating and as though it’s a big responsibility (it is), but live chat truly could be the edge you’re looking for to take your website and business to the next level of success.

The post Is Live Chat a Good Idea for Your Website? appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Let’s take a brief tour through recent WDS history to get you completely caught up to today:

Team Growth

Prior to 2014, WDS worked in one group that took on projects based on developer availability, which was a controlled chaos, but chaos nevertheless. During that time, we transitioned from being a company that focused on small builds (blogs and businesses) to a full-scale design and development agency that took on enterprise clients; the kind of clients we looked to work with (and started to sign) expected high levels of customization and design work that was not only attractive, but effective, so we adjusted accordingly. This period also led us to narrowing our spotlight: we stopped splitting our labor between creating premium products and client services to focus exclusively on the latter.

As our workload increased, it became clear we needed more leadership and structure, as well as more people. As a result, at WDSCamp 2014, WDS created teams with a more hierarchical structure–including dedicated project managers and developer/designer leads.

In 2014, we also added a third team to our mix when WebDevStudios acquired Maintainn, a WordPress maintenance and support company founded by Shayne Sanderson. We were pleased and proud to bring Maintainn into the fold; combining their super-skilled folks with ours has allowed us to offer more comprehensive services to our clients. In 2015, we’ve been able to utilize this acquisition to offer clients a seamless transition from site build to ongoing maintenance and give them the opportunity to truly see their investment (their site!) in action. Being able to offer this has been huge for us; we get to provide clients the opportunity to keep their site in the hands of people they know and trust. 

In 2015, these teams became more focused, allowing us to take on bigger clients and more complex projects. After facing a few unexpected challenges in 2014, we pushed forward to update our operating procedures and standards–an endeavor in streamlining our workflow and boosting our efficiency that has extended well into this last year. Creating standardized processes for how we handle clients, projects, and internal communication has transformed the way that we work, and is something we’re continuing to do as we grow.

In the last two years, as the teams were truly hitting their stride, we also had the opportunity to expand other parts of WDS, including our marketing. Dre Armeda came on as the VP of Operations and led the charge on amping up our marketing efforts. In turn, this led to hiring me at the beginning of 2015. Since then, we’ve had a steady concentration on developing a more extensive strategy and refining our process moving forward.

One of the big things we set out to do was organically grow WDS’ presence on the web, and of course, content marketing is a major part of that. When we started collaborating around what we wanted that to look like, we realized that our major assets (our ragtag team of jaw-droppingly smart misfits with varied life and professional experiences) overlapped with our fundamental values (education and community), and that we could utilize this to our advantage.

Both learning and teaching, as well as contributing to the WordPress community, has always been high priority for WDS, and we wanted our content to reflect that. As a result, in the last year we’ve more than doubled the number of posts put out during the course of the year. While some of those still include the basics, like which events our team members will be attending, the vast majority of our blog is dedicated to sharing what we’ve learned, what we love, and what we’re trying out, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. 

Over the last year and a half, we’ve seen our teams flourish into glorious, productive beasts, ready to take on pretty much anything, anywhere. As these teams have matured and improved the way we work, we’ve seen our folks do what they do best: get business done, learn well, and create fantastic work–even when the workload is intense!

Superheroes Stepping Forward

Part of that team growth is not only reflected in terms of numbers, but also advancement. Over the last year, these folks got promoted:

• Melissa Hoppe – from Customer Service Representative to Project Manager
• Dre Armeda – from Vice President of Operations to Chief Marketing Officer (and Partner)
• Justin Sternberg – from Developer Lead to Director of Engineering
• Chris Reynolds – from Developer to Developer Lead
• Rami Abraham – from Developer to Developer Lead
• Jay Wood – from Junior Developer to Developer

We created a few positions that hadn’t previously existed in their current iterations (Client Communications Specialist, Chief Marketing Officer, the Director of Engineering, and Maintainn’s Project Manager). All of these, of course, include tasks that were being completed before, but these positions were created to help ease the workload on those who were doing two, three, or four jobs at the same time and provide a concerted effort in areas that were being underserved.

We also said goodbye to some folks we adore; we were sad to say goodbye to Patrick Garman, Stacy Kvernmo, and Shayne Sanderson, who moved on to new endeavors.

We’ve Learned Some Stuff

We’re a relatively small company, but we still work with big clients. As a result, much of our education has been a baptism by fire! Over the last few years, we’ve learned a few crucial things:

Get everything in writing.

The necessity for the Director of Engineering position became clear when we realized that our communication with clients wasn’t absolutely everything it could be. In the past, we made the mistake of not having every minute detail planned out and assumed it would be fine–only to find out that this sometimes wasn’t the case.  By refining our process for project discovery and signing clients, we elevated the level of service we provide. We now have the ability to forecast more accurately, to be more efficient, and to make sure that everyone is on the same page–about absolutely everything.

Don’t be afraid to ask for accountability–both from your team and from your clients.

This is where the importance of leadership comes in. If you read our blog, you’ve probably already read a few things by our project managers on the importance of taking responsibility when leading a team; our three amazing PMs (and the developer leads they work with) have fearlessly served as advocates for both their team members and the clients they work with. Their motivation, organization, and fortitude has helped us all work better.

Know how–and when–to grow.

One of the conversations that is constantly taking place is: How and when can we extend? We work with big clients, but we’re still a small team. By being conservative but proactive in the way we hire, we avoid straining our resources.

Value the folks around you.

While we’re always accepting applications and have pushed for new hires throughout the year, you may have noticed that we love to promote from within. We’ve been lucky; we have a team of people who love to learn, love to teach, and have an overwhelming sense of humility when it comes to what they know and where they came from, as well as a strong sense of commitment (read: mild workaholism) and determination. As a result, we’ve ended up with a lot of die-hard WDS-ers who have grown within the company. Reward the folks you work with–not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes your team better.

WDSCamp 2015 was also an extraordinary demonstration of how our team is valued. The bonding was real and it was derived from the company culture created by our executives. That culture prioritizes value even in day-to-day interactions; the politeness, appreciation, and admiration, both expressed directly and when someone isn’t around, would be too Pollyanna-ish to be believed if it weren’t so obviously sincere. This is a fundamental component of how and why our team can do what it does so well.

Cause for Celebration

This last year has been good to us! We’ve been fortunate to accomplish quite a lot: 

• We kicked off the year with a gorgeous new site complete with a fun little easter egg (that changes to one of Rami’s brilliant creations once a week).
  
• Maintainn also got a snazzy refresh in the spring.
• We worked on projects for major brand names, including Discovery Communications, Uber, HEB, National Park Services, Microsoft, and Campbell’s Soup.
  
• We saw our lead inquiries increase over 90%. Yes, seriously.
  
• With the help of Michael, all of our Project Managers (and I) got props in BuddyPress.
  
• Three new books on WordPress dropped: Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 3rd Edition, dropped in January 2015, WordPress for Dummies, 7th Edition, dropped in August 2015, and WordPress Web Design for Dummies, 3rd Edition, dropped in October 2015.
  
• We hosted our largest WDSCamp ever and it was a resounding success! We were having withdrawals for months to come (possibly still now).
  
• Custom Post Types UI was our first plugin to hit one million downloads.
  
• During the State of the Word, presented by Matt Mullenweg at the inaugural WordCamp US, we were recognized for the work we have done with Microsoft Dynamics.
  
• Brad was one of the organizers of the aforementioned inaugural WordCamp US, which was an incredible success, and mentioned in the decree naming December 5th, 2015 WordPress Day in Philadelphia. 

WebDevStudios in the New Year

Moving forward, we’re super excited to see what happens for WordPress in 2016 (and beyond). We’re looking forward to seeing how utilizing WP-Rest API enables us to provide more unique experiences for our clients and getting more focused on JavaScript as a team. We’ve spent extensive time working on stabilizing the WDS workflow and process, and we’re excited to see where that takes us next. We will be driving more focus toward certain products like Maintainn, AppPresser, and more. Lastly (but not least-ly), you’ll see us at more events, both domestically and internationally; we’ll still be a presence in the WordPress community that we adore and you’ll see us at other tech events as well.

It’s a new year. 2016, we’re coming for you!

The post Another Awesome WDS Year Down and Many More to Go appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Not a literal stage!

The answer is to set up what is known as a staging, or development site. What is that you ask? It’s a duplicate copy of your existing site that is located in a place that visitors are not going to know about, and not be able to access. This will allow you and others to develop and revise the website safely without risk of real visitors knowing anything is going on.

When I should get a staging site?

In February 2015, Google posted an article about finding more mobile-friendly search results. This meant that they would favor mobile-friendly websites over non-mobile friendly websites starting later that spring. If you had been holding out on making your website more responsive, Google’s announcement may have been a good kick in the pants to get started. No one wants to lose their search ranking, and we do not want to see you lose that either! Having a staging copy of your website allows you to make your current theme mobile friendly (or replace your website’s theme with one that already is). Both aren’t quick changes, so allowing your users to see the current site while you do the work benefits everyone.

Some other examples of times where you would want to consider a staging site include:

• When making any template file or style changes, responsive or not
• When doing upgrades of WordPress core or plugins, especially between major versions. This helps prevent white screens
• User testing of new features

There are many more reasons, but these are just some common times using a staging site benefits you in a big way.

How do I go about acquiring this copy?

This is a good question, and the solution will depend on certain things. The first question to ask is if your hosting provider has any staging management already provided. If you are hosted through WPEngine or SiteGround for example, then you have easy staging management already. Other hosting providers may vary.

If you are not hosted through either of those, you are not out of luck, but there will be more required steps. It is possible to have a subdomain or alternate domain created to host the copy of the staging site. The only real difference would be amount of work needed to have it created.

If you would like to minimize the manual work required and have no problem with the staging site being hosted by a third party, a plugin/service like WP Stagecoach is a viable option for you. It is a premium service, but from the looks of it, they would be worth the annual fee.

If you are looking for an extensive how-to that does not rely on third parties, check out a more extensive post over at the Maintainn blog. You can always just hire Maintainn to help you out as well.

We have the copied site created, now what?

This is the point where the real work starts. All people involved in the desired work are going to be able to make changes and test things out and get it all ready for the eventual release on the live site without worry.

Once all the changes have been made and verified to cause no major issues, the changes need to be uploaded and implemented on the live site. This will include importing or re-implementing any changes for database content, as well as uploading changed files via (s)ftp or, if you are lucky, merging the changes into the production branch of your version control. Once that is done, any caches should be flushed so that users will receive the labors of your hard work.

What should I keep in mind with a staging site?

The primary thing to keep in mind is access by those who should not have it. This includes more than just people. You don’t want search engine spiders to be crawling the site as well, as you will risk having duplicate content indexed, which is not good in their eyes.

Enabling password access will be a big step in preventing both from occurring. There are WordPress plugins available for this as well as server-level configuration options.

You will also want to disable any caching you have available for your site while working on changes. This will make it easier to see what you have done and keep development swift.

If you have any questions, let us know in the comment section below.

The post Staging Websites for Safe Development appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Read more about Maintainn’s update over on their blog, and hey, don’t take my word for how fantastic the new site looks–give it a glimpse yourself!

The post Maintainn Gets a Refresh! appeared first on WebDevStudios.