As a freelance developer, or a WordPress business owner, or any other person offering services for the popular platform, what is the number one factor that determines whether you will succeed or fail? A superior skill set? Knowing marketing for developers? Or perhaps a direct phone line to Matt Mullenweg? Hands down, the most important factor to be successful in building a profitable WordPress business is the ability to find and keep clients. In fact, without clients, you aren’t even in business. You are just very good at one of your hobbies. But how do you get clients, especially at the beginning stages? […]

Many websites possess a power that is usually reserved for superheroes. No, not superhuman speed, laser sight, or the ability to look good in spandex. Instead, the special ability that a large number of websites possess is the power of invisibility. What would provide us with endless opportunities in our personal lives is less than desirable in case of our web presences. Little is more frustrating than putting a lot of work into a site only to have the traffic be virtually zero because nobody can find it. The antidote (or kryptonite if you will) to this invisibility is SEO. When […]

China has been on the news a lot in the last years. The growth of its economy is leaving people in disbelief. It seems like not even a month goes by without some superlative-spouting news about the People’s Republic. Not just since Alibaba, the China-based e-commerce giant, landed the biggest IPO in history is the world looking toward Asia’s powerhouse and its growing industry and service sector. Yet with all the news and commotion, China’s online market is still a bit of a Pandora’s box for most internet marketers. Very few people dare to venture there for lack of available […]

Have you been on a date/night out with friends/any social gathering lately? Let me make a bold prediction: At some point, the conversation you were having ceased because the other party was staring onto their cellphone to check Emails, Facebook or “quickly look something up on the web.” If it wasn’t the other person, it was probably you. So am I psychic? No. It’s merely the times we are living in. Cellphones and other mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. I mean, have you seen the line for the new iPhones? Whether this development is good […]

“Really?! Eight downloads? I have been sleep deprived for three months for that? I missed my daughter’s middle-school play for eight freakin’ downloads? Eight!?” Creating a product can be a disappointment. You pour your heart and soul into something for months, cut all the time from working with clients that you can, neglect your day job to the point that you are not sure if they won’t fire you, and isolate yourself to the point that your family starts referring to you as “the other person living here.” Until finally, it’s done. The thing you have been working on is […]

As a serious user of WordPress, one of the things you will do most often is run through its installation process. Whether it’s on your own site, a local development environment, or the live site of a client, the 5-minute WordPress install will be part of your daily life—like eating and breathing. Usually setting up a website with WordPress consists of the following steps: Download and unpack the latest version of WordPress Create a MySQL database and user with all necessary privileges Upload WordPress files via FTP Run the installation Done You can even skip part of the installation by […]