Tag: business

The Advantage of WordPress

January 23, 2017 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 29 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about the advantage of WordPress and CMS for business websites. What is a CMS? If you are looking to build a website, WordPress is a CMS that is used by 30% of the internet, and is easy to manage. SaviorLabs can get you set up and running with a world-class website using WordPress.

Introduction

Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. My name is Jacob. I’m here with Paul, and we’re talking about WordPress for business websites. Is there advantages? What are the advantages of having WordPress for your business website? So, Paul, just to kind of get things going, is WordPress right for everybody?

Paul: It is absolutely the only thing that a human, to be a complete human being… It is the missing little bit.

Jacob: It is what fills the vacuum of your website heart.

Paul: No. I’d say complete heart.

Jacob: Complete.

Paul: Yeah. Really, it’s complete. So… Well, you know, it depends. WordPress, first of all, it depends on what your, what your goals are, and what you want to do with that. And, you know, if you’re a company like Samsung, that may or may not be the answer. I don’t, I don’t know, you know. I mean, actually there are some very long companies using WordPress. But, you know, is it, just a brochure? Or is it actually going to have all their financial data in it? It’s going to have applications in it. And so there’s a lot of questions there. But I don’t want to make this about necessarily a technical discussion. It’s more of a business discussion. You know, so you, we want to help you make an informed choice, and help you to get a handle on what those choices might be.

And so let’s give you a little bit of a layout of what’s going on in the world. There’s this thing called the CMS, or content management system. It allows you to manage content. What is a website do? It presents content to people. It’s organized by menus and areas on a page and stuff like that. So the content management system helps you do that.

In the old days, you might get a, like you’d open up a Word document, and you’d type in something, and you would bold it and maybe type in another paragraph and put underlines under certain words and all that. You would do that, and you would actually code the html. Okay? And you might, if you’ve been around a while and had a business for a while, you might have some recollection of that. You might have actually done it.

What a content meeting system does is helps you very easily make menus without having to deal with any of the HTML. You can get there if you want to, but you don’t have to deal with any of that code. And so it does a lot of heavy-lifting for you and makes it easy.

Now, there are lots of CMSs out there. The, the three major ones are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Now if you look at the amount of websites out there, 27% of them, approximately, are running WordPress. That’s an amazing statistic. That’s—

Jacob: What’s the next runner up on that?

Paul: The next one is Joomla at about 3%. So it’s 10-fold, a magnitude.

Jacob: Wow. So that the second competitor is way below WordPress.

Paul: And then, when you go down to the next one, 2.2% with Drupal, and there’s some other ones, but they’re noise level. So why does 30% of the web, of the internet, run WordPress? Well, because it’s pretty good, you know. It’s darn good. So it’s more so for me when, you know, talking with people the recommending things, it’s like, well why wouldn’t I recommend WordPress. And there are some reasons technically that we can get into that you might not want to do that. And, uh, you know, if it’s a really big site, the tools built into WordPress aren’t as good as some of the other tools for managing thousands of articles and things like that.

So I think it’s reasonable for most business owners of most sizes to say, “Yeah. I’m going to run a WordPress site.” And then it becomes what do I do that? What do I do with that? And how do I get there? And, there’s a lot happening, in, in sort of the WordPress world. They are innovating constantly. They’re coming out with new versions and things change, and you want to basically try. You can, if you go out and search for what they call plugins, which add functionality or themes, which is basically the look and feel of the site — color, fonts, things like that. Those are… You can download a theme. And, you know, most themes are built by small mom-and-pop individual developers that go out and build the theme, and they’re interested in it today, and they go out and build it. And a bunch of people buy it and use it and maybe even customize it. But they may lose interest. And so now you’re two years down the road, and that theme is no longer supported.

So you need to be careful with vendors that you’re going to use and plugin vendors that you’re going to use to see that they have ongoing support. And, you know, I strongly recommend not just buying the theme and it’s support, but planning to buy the support as it goes on. Because they need a value. They need, uh, money coming in to keep them interested in supporting the theme.

Jacob: Yeah. That’s why I… Actually, maybe three or four years ago at this point, I bought a lifetime subscription to Elegant Themes.

Paul: Right. Now that was a good bet because Elegant Themes is an ongoing concern. The problem is is that, you know, you had some special knowledge that Elegant Themes was a good one. You could have bought one from one of the other ones that have gone out of business. So there is that risk.

Jacob: There is a risk, but I… It was, to me, looking at them, for the very reasons you’re talking about, they’re going to… It’s a calculated risk, but they have a sufficient enough heft as a company that I could tell, they’re at least going to be around for five to ten years, and so that would have negated the expense of a lifetime subscription back then.

Paul: And so, you know, when, when acquiring these themes, you want to look at what the technology is behind them. So, you know, if you went out and bought an HTML theme, that’s probably not good. You want to buy an HTML5 theme. Well, what’s difference between HTML4 and 5? One, you know. Well, I mean, it’s like okay. Well, no. There’s a lot of difference. And, uh, you know, that’s where, you know, you need to talk with people that are experts in this or at least have some expertise in it to help you choose that. And then also make sure that your theme supports mobile, you know.

So how do you use the theme so that you can arrange items in it so that when it’s rendered on mobile, they come out in the right order and the right shape.

And those are, those are critical things. And then, as we move on to plugins, plugins can be both, hugely beneficial but can also be a security risk, especially as they become aged. Because, uh, you know, most of security risks are not discovered when somebody releases a new program or a new plugin or something. They’re discovered that, “Oh, over here in this product, unrelated to your product or your plugin, we’ve found that in a library that’s been out there for three years… That’s been out there for three years, this library’s been out there for three years, somebody discovers a bug in it. Now I can exploit that library. And now I can exploit all of the things that are based on that library. So all of the plugins that use that.

And then I can go and do a probing test on the websites and find out that hey, you’re using that plugin. And now I can do that. Now if that vendor is not in business anymore, or if that’s not being maintained,we’re going to have a problem. What do you do?

So now you, you, let’s say you had a, uh, a form that you…a form package that you had, and you had it in there, and it was worked, working. Well, first of all, you’re not a geek necessarily. You might be, but most business people aren’t. You might not even know that there’s an exploit to that. And since that form package is no longer being maintained, you’re not going to get a notice from them that it has to be upgraded.

So you need to be very careful with what you choose to use. You know, it’s sort of like using retread tires. You know, if you know they’re retread, okay, I can…I’m willing to carry an extra spare and things like that. But if you didn’t know it was retread, you’d have no reason to say, “You know, I’m going to drive crazy,” and the tire is going to blow out and I get injured.

So it’s a lot of, a lot of that. You know, some of the areas, WordPress has the difficult job of, because they’re used so much so many places, that they can’t change themselves too much. You know, it’d be like saying, “Okay, I’m going to take and change the standard for the inch.” I can’t do that, because everybody knows what an inch is, and I’ve got all these rulers out there.

Well, WordPress has some issues that they’re doing a very good job managing, and nothing that should be an issue, but they can’t radically depart and change it. So everything in the future will be based on this WordPress and, you know, and it will be interesting to see how they, how they move into the future further.

Jacob: So, my understanding is that WordPress is, great for most instances of a small website. It begins to break down in usefulness when you get into gigantic websites. Is that accurate? Or what are the instances where not using WordPress is helpful?

Paul: Well, so for example, we have a client who is an entrepreneur professor and, MIT professor, and he has on his website, hundreds and hundreds of articles. So if you’re familiar with WordPress and you go to the, let me see, the pages or the posts, it is just a long continuous list. I cannot filter that by a category. So I can’t say, “Okay. Give me all of the, uh, business links, business articles.” There’s just no way to do that. I can, I can search. But it’s going to search on the title.

Jacob: Yeah. Or you can tag them.

Paul: You can tag them, but it’s awkward, you know. There’s just that tool isn’t built in. It’s not as easy, whereas in some of the other ones, I can go in and filter that list by attributes of that. And the reason it’s not there is because most people don’t have that problem. And so very much so, they deal with what the majority of people have issues with.

Jacob: So then what are the instances where using, not using WordPress is going to be better for a company?

Paul: Well, one of the things is everybody knows it, so there’s a lot of support out there for it. You know, should you have a web developer, it’s, it’s easy for somebody to come in and augment that web developer and help that. That speaks also to documentation, you know. You’ve got to make sure that you’re web developer gives you sort of a run book for how to run your website — what components are used, where they came from why they’re being used, what they do and what modifications have been made, that that sort of Rosetta Stone is critical.

So WordPress, you know, you have the, the, the advantage of it being sort of “standard.” And you can leverage that, and you can also look at other example websites, see how they’re doing these, and then follow them. So there’s, there’s a huge advantage there.

Jacob: Yea, so if somebody, for whatever reason, is not on WordPress, how would you recommend getting them there?

Paul: Well, okay. That’s a great question. I’d want to know what you’re on now. And you might be on Wix or you might be on, uh, a website builder from GoDaddy or something like that. And really, what it is is you’ve got to migrate your content. You’ve got to copy that content out, put it into WordPress pages or posts, and it’s a manual task, and take that opportunity to rethink your content. So you might have some stuff you think is really good. One of the critical things there is have somebody else review it because, you’re too close to it, more than likely.

Jacob: Yeah. And one of the things that there’s several, sort of, plugins that we use that are kind of, they’re available, but we just kind of standard practice put them on all of our websites, that help improve…that work with WordPress to help improve search engine optimization. So SEO on websites. Make sure the images are compressed correctly, that it’s going to be, uh, attuned for the website to run as fast and efficiently and attractively as possible, that I think aren’t necessarily completely unique to WordPress, but just work really well with WordPress.

Paul: Yeah. They integrate very well. They’re not cumbersome. They just work.

Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, this is great. This is, I think, in many ways, this is a bit of like Why WordPress 101. I think we’ll revisit this someday down the road. But thanks for listening to The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. And we will talk to you next week.

Thoughts on Entrepreneurship and Staying Informed

November 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 26 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Paul about finding time to stay informed, entrepreneurship, and augmented reality. We’ll keep you on edge!

Show Notes

Tim Cook and Augmented Reality

Transcript

Sections

Staying Informed and Entrepreneurial
Tim Cook says augmented reality will be bigger than virtual reality

Staying Informed and Entrepreneurial

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: So, Paul, as we look at the way you are productive and that you contribute to the business world, the entrepreneur world, and Savior Labs, the company that you founded and lead, there is a high volume of articles and content that you are pushing out, and it makes me wonder, how do you organize your time. How do you prioritize your time? How do you reduce what we’ve talked about as cognitive dissonance? How do you set up your time so that you can focus and read and think about what’s important and the things that are interesting to you?

Paul: Well, I think I take the time. You know, thankfully, this company called Apple invented an iPad, which makes it very easy to consume information. I mean, when it first came out, it was a… I tagged it as an information consumption device. That’s really what it is. It’s a way to consume information and so now I’ve… Over the past year, I have equally shifted towards the iPhone, because I have an iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a little bigger. And I can consume information there.

It is a very wide net that I cast, and it’s largely motivated at, because I don’t want to miss anything. Not because, you know, I’m not interested in the recent gossip on Brad and…whoever. You know.  That’s not what I’m interested in. But I’m interested in thoughts that are occurring, so much so, that somebody has written about it. And they’ve made effort to do that.

And so what you see is these signals, you know, that are coming in. And you have to arbitrate them. And you know, I’ve been blessed with an ability to arbitrate lots of signals at once. Some might call that multitasking. Most of my reading is done while I’m doing something else.

Jacob: Is it really?

Paul: Yeah. It really is.

Jacob: So you don’t… Some guys talk about setting aside, you know, 30 minutes at the end of the day or whatever to do this.

Paul: No. I’ll use it as down time. Like, you know all the time. I mean, I was in a meeting last night, and then was some down time between it while people were getting their coffee and stuff like that and, you know, whatever the snacks were. And I was sitting there flipping through Flipboard. Oh, this is really interesting.
You know, a lot of the times, I tag the things, and it’s because I think they’re interest. Well, no. It is. I mean, it’s because I think it’s interesting and something that will add value to my daily routine, uh, and produce benefit. And, you know, people come along and say “How do you know all this stuff?”Well, you know, I just take a pill that adds it all to me every day.

Jacob: The Matrix downloads it.

Paul: I do the work, you know. But you’ve to be looking for those nuggets. You know what’s interesting is 30 years ago, it was very hard to dig this information out.

Jacob: Right. You had to get a subscription to 20 different magazines and keep your newspaper in front of you.

Paul: Yeah. It was very hard.

Jacob: But now, it seems to me like I think the word that’s coming out of this is being intentionally curious about the world around you.

Paul: Yeah. I think so. I am definitely curious and fascinated on so many different levels. Why is this? What’s this? What’s this? And you’ll see that as, you know, different things I edge into. I do have another habit where I post things that, you know, they get posted to Twitter. I also have a private channel where I save things that I want to read in depth and ponder, that I want to revisit that’s a much shorter list, but it’s stuff that… And it’s sometimes, like, weird. I mean, completely orthogonal to what you might think I was interested in.
So, but, I will, you know, I’ll get home from work, have a few minutes of downtime then, you know, I’ll read a whole bunch of articles then and, uh, usually when I’m going to bed, before going to sleep, I’ll, I’ll read a whole bunch then. When I’m exercising, if it’s on, you know, like a treadmill or something, I’ll definitely do it then. So that’s, you know, using all those, those opportunities.

Jacob: Yeah. That’s excellent. Well, thanks for sharing with us about how to be, how being intentionally curious is functional in your life.

Apple and Augmented Reality

Jacob: So, Paul, you recently were telling me about an article that you were reading about Tim Cook, the great Tim Cook, who, by the way, at the beginning of college football season, I will just acknowledge and celebrate in public that he is an Auburn University graduate.

Paul: Well, we all make mistakes.

Jacob: This is not going to way I expected. So, Tim Cook on virtual reality and Apple’s posture on virtual reality. Talk us through that article and just some of your thoughts, because you were sharing some very interesting things about that with me.

Paul: Sure. Well, first of all, you know, when, when Tim Cook talks, everybody listens. This is the voice of Apple now. And, uh, you know, he’s a very different person than Steve Jobs, you know. So we have to…he’s a business person. Steve Jobs was a visionary. You know, I’m not saying that Tim isn’t a visionary, but I don’t think that’s what he would put on his business card.
You know, where Steve, if he didn’t put it on his business card, we’d put it on there. And it certainly—

Jacob: Yeah. Well, his name is almost synonymous with the term visionary.

Paul: Yeah. So the whole idea and what bottom line is, is that… It’s an article in Vanity Fair based on an interview that was done with Good Morning America just September 14th, I think. He talks about augmented reality and virtual reality. And basically, he’s saying virtual reality, you know, is, is one thing. Augmented reality is going to be the one that takes off. And primarily, because it can be a shared experience. That’s really the distillation of what he’s saying, is that I put a virtual reality headset on, I’m isolated from you in the same room.

Now, we could both be in the same virtual reality, but I can’t interact with you really. I mean, I might be able to touch you or hit you or do something like that, but I can’t, I can’t have the visual, my visual cortex, you know, be engaged with your shape and who you are and see that you’re grimacing. I can’t see that.

Augmented reality, I can do that. And so, you know, augmented reality and the way the Microsoft HoloLens was sort of first introduced, it was a person in a house, and they looked at the refrigerator, and they saw a list of things that they needed in the refrigerator. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s sort of goofy.” But now if you sort of extrapolate that and say that we’re both going to go play a game, and we look at that wall and we both see the, the monster and we have to go and get that…

Jacob: The Pokémon.

Paul: The Pokémon. Yeah. So, that, that’s a little bit better. And so that sounds more intriguing than having my grocery list on the refrigerator. I don’t know why I’d have my grocery list on the refrigerator. That’s not when I need it. I need it when I’m at the store. Or actually, I need it when I’m driving near the store, and I haven’t made a commitment to go somewhere else. You know, like if you know, I imagine there will be some systems for augmented reality that will tell you, just after you passed the store, that you should have stopped. But that wouldn’t have been good. It would have been, “Hey, you’re heading up here. You’re going past your favorite market. Why don’t you stop and get these five things that we know you need?”

So really, he didn’t say a lot. You know, Apple has no play in this game. They have nothing in virtual reality. Samsung has virtual reality — it’s cool — for their phones. They can snap into a headset. You can do that.
Virtual reality is important because when we’re not in the same room, virtual reality is someplace where we can actually interact.

Jacob: It’s a place in between where we can connect.

Paul: Right. So I do that on Facebook with people all the time. Well, you know, I don’t think it will be all that unusual. And that’s why they bought Oculus is because they want the Facebook experience to happen in a virtual reality. So that means that the whole, you know, backdrop is virtual generated. Well, in augmented reality, only other things are generated. So, you know, you might have a white wall in your living room, and that might be a picture frame into a virtual reality that is where your Facebook friends are. So they come online, and you see them standing there in a combination of virtual and augmented reality.

So the augmented reality gives you that ability to have it within your own context. So you’re not isolated. There’s a, there’s a great movie from the ’80s called Brainstorm, which talks about, you know, some deprivation chambers and their…and some reality headsets that they were wearing. Very fascinating study on how that stuff can go horribly wrong. And, uh, you know, I don’t think it’s going to go that way — you know, science fiction, and I think more fiction than science.

But, you know, so Apple doesn’t have a dog in this fight yet. But hey. He’s talking about it.

Jacob: It’s telling and it’s interesting that Apple would not pull the trigger on one way or the other, which is probably an indication that what Steve Cook is saying, like, augmented reality is going to probably be the winner, but they haven’t laid their cards on the table yet or put their money in on a particular direction yet.

Paul: And you know, you have to remember, Apple is a consumer electronics company that makes stuff for mass market. They’re not a niche company. These are niche products.

Jacob: These are still niche products.

Paul: Very much so.

Jacob: And I think that’s helpful. That’s certainly not the way they come across in terms of tone at times. Like, they seem like, “This is the future.” Well, maybe it is, but at the moment, 0.0001% of the market actually cares about this. And I think maybe the tipping point might have been Pokémon Go.

Paul: Yeah. Well, it’s definitely…there’s a collision there of augmented and reality, you know. What’s interesting, though, my son is 16 years old and has some money from doing some work and was very interested in getting a virtual reality headset. And I said, you know, “It’s your money, if you want to do that.” That was 700, 800 bucks, a decent amount of money for the, I forget the one. The one that works with Steam. And he was enamored with it. And I said, “Well, you know, I was reading a great article.” It’s one we posted, I don’t know, probably three or four months ago where somebody had several virtual reality headsets sitting in his closet. And he was lamenting the fact. I mean, he got most of them… I don’t know if he bought them or he had them given to him, but he was like, “I just don’t use them.” And I, I said, you know, “You should really read that before you go off.” And he read that and read a few of these, and he says, “Yeah. I think I’m going to wait.”

Because there’s a lot of technology that, you know, sounds promising and you buy it and invest in it, and it’s a letdown. You know, and that’s what’s going to go on my tombstone, you know. Technology will always let you down, because our, you know, our brain is so malleable. And we can imagine the best case scenario. And it’s very rare that technology delivers that best case scenario.

Jacob: Excellent. Well, thanks for your thoughts on that update from Tim Cook and augmented reality. We’ll be looking to see what happens with Apple on that fight and in that dog in the race in the days ahead.

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