WordPress has grown and matured in the past 10 years as a content management system and web app platform, and the needs of clients and enterprises using WordPress have grown as well. To answer that call, WordPress agencies and consultancies will need to adapt by strengthening their teams, bettering their WP coding practices, and becoming more active in the community, too. Learn what enterprises want from their WordPress partners from what we've learned on the WordPress.com VIP team, and some tips to help small, medium, and large agencies ready for the next 10 years of WordPress projects and challenges.
Presentation originally presented at WordCamp Paris, January 2014.
14. “How do you plan for the future
while you hunt for your next
meal?”
– NICK GERNERT
A U T O M AT T I C , F O R M E R LY V O C E
C O M M U N I C AT I O N S
15. GROWING
• Always be interviewing
• Try before you hire
• Distributed == Find talent anywhere
• Network inside the WP community
16. “To build the kind of sites we
wanted, for the kind of
clients we wanted, we needed to
put together a team of
specialists.”
– SIMON DICKSON, CODE FOR THE PEOPLE
17. “Keep a client. Make a
partnership.”
– PA U L M A I O R A N A
V P M E D I A S E R V I C E S , A U T O M AT T I C
23. “[WordPress agencies] often have
the talent, but aren't pulling
together the non-development
skills that make clients
comfortable spending the big
bucks.”
– M AT T M U L L E N W E G
29. “Every line of code we ship has at
least one extra set of eyes on it. It's
not supervisory, it's peer review,
which fosters collaboration.”
–AUSTIN SMITH, ALLEY INTERACTIVE
35. TELLING YOUR CODE’S STORY
• Development approach & coding decisions
• Server or architecture setup & modifications
• Modifications of or forking .org plugins
• Development workflows
41. BE IN THE COMMUNITY
• WordCamps, Meetups, Hack Days
• Present, Sponsor, Participate, Host
• Release Code & Plugins to .org
• Beta test new releases