The Need For Speed

You know, it’s funny…

Down here in Florida, we’ve had a long span of super dry weather. Pretty much drought conditions. Been looking forward to rain. But then…

Mother nature picked the week we had a family RV trip scheduled to the Florida Keys to unleash. 🤷‍♂️ So, yeppers. We’re down here in the Keys. Weather is gorgeous as I type these words this morning, but… the next few days promise to be quite rainy.

I guess we can’t complain. We asked for it. 🤣

So, let’s get into it…

What’s coming up in this issue:

• Why speed has a lot to do with success
• Some news about Concierge
• WordPress Quick Bits
• Stupid web design components to avoid

Let’s go…

The Need For Speed

In the last many years, I’ve known people who are just action takers. People who just don’t spend a whole lot of time spinning their wheels and pondering…. but they just DO.

I remember this one conversation with a husband and wife duo. Both of them entrepreneurs. But, clearly… she was (and is) the kind of person who just leans in and does stuff.

As entrepreneurs do, we were talking business. Business ideas. Doesn’t really matter what it was. But, the interesting thing was…

The husband was busy talking about details. And the what-ifs.

The wife was already busy making phone calls. She had already started.

In that particular duo, the husband seems like more of the backend kind of guy. He’s the kind of guy who works behind the scenes and makes things work.

The wife, on the other hand, is out there. Talks to everybody. Seems to know everybody.

She is an action taker.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and parrot all of the numerous people who preach about taking action. We all freakin’ know that already. 😇

But, instead, I want to look at it simply in terms of SPEED.

This world works based on flow. Energy flow. No matter what is taking place, it has to move. Thinking about things doesn’t accomplish jack.

Your business… is a flow. Whatever series of steps you have to do to produce the product of your business…. that’s a flow.

And one of the huge hallmarks of success, I’ve found, is the SPEED of flow.

People and business that flow slowly just kind of limp along. The ones that flow quickly often do very well. The energy flows quickly.

In more tangible terms, this just means to take action quickly. Less thinking…. more doing.

It means taking on an attitude of just leaning into things. When faced with any decision, one doesn’t sit around and pounder it for awhile and paralyze. But, they just make a decision and GO. Realizing that there’s no danger in either direction on that decision anyway… so you just make it and move on.

Success comes with speed of particle flow. Speed of energy flow.

When it comes to business, the goal is to produce your products and services quickly. Do it with SPEED. Customers freakin’ love speed, too. Everybody wants what they want as soon as possible. And not only is speed of flow what produces success, but it gives you one hell of a selling point for what you do. People will pay more for speed.

Now, this speed of flow is definitely something I’m looking at hard in my own business. Cuz, there’s work to do. More on that below. 👇

But, for yourself, a couple of quickie tips:

• Take stock of your daily productivity and look for opportunities to speed things up. Find ways to remove the TIME from it.
• Often, things get hung up on decision points. It is like the computer came to a point in the algorithm with multiple potential pathways and execution just stopped. It is a “maybe”. There’s no further action taken after that. So, the way to unstick things is to find those stuck decisions… those stuck maybe’s… and just unstick them. Make a decision… ANY decision. And then move.

Lot of times, people hold themselves back from taking action. Out of fear. Out of stuck maybe’s. If those things are spotted and disintegrated, things start to flow again.

And when they flow with SPEED, it is amazing what can happen.

This Week In Concierge

Concierge is going to be changing a little bit when I get back into the office next week. And here’s why…

Concierge has grown to a point where any larger projects (even medium size ones) end up taking too long. Day-to-day stuff, no problem. But, longer projects (like theme transitions, site builds, etc.) end up taking too long. I’m very keenly aware of the fact that I have several of my clients who are waiting for projects to be completed.

Frankly, client work is even making it tougher to work on my own business.

I’m the bottleneck. And so, just like my article above discussed, I need to speed up particle flow.

So, when I get back, I am looking to onboard a new developer. I plan to have a conversation with a service provider next week when I return. I basically need another “me”…. at least part time. This way I can get client projects executed faster.

I don’t have the exact person determined yet, but I’m quite sure I know where I will be hiring from and we’re going to be talking next week.

Obviously, this increases expenses for me. And, you don’t get good people cheaply. If I’m going to have somebody else working on client sites, that person needs to be GOOD. And that doesn’t exactly come cheaply. This isn’t some kind of Fiverr gig or an Upwork job. I need somebody who can live up to what I want CONCIERGE to be.

So, some adjustments are likely to be made to Concierge. Some pricing changes, perhaps. No worries for existing Concierge clients, tho, as I won’t be changing rates on you at all. 😇

In the end, my goal is to speed up project flow. And take things up a notch. I will definitely keep you in the loop.

I knew when I pivoted into client services that adjustments would need to be made over time. And I’m really happy that Concierge has grown to where it has and I expect it to grow further. But, it is now time to expand things beyond myself. And that move begins next week.

WordPress Quick Bits

WPFunnels Updates. WPFunnels is a product which is on my list to be reviewed. It is an alternative to CartFlows, which I use pretty frequently. WPFunnels has recently came out with some updates, to support product bundling in checkout as well as integrations with MailMint, Zoho and Omnisend. Check out their changelog here.

WordPress 6.5.4. Most of you guys probably had your sites auto-update to WordPress 6.5.4 last week. It was a minor release which fixes just a handful of bugs, but one of the more notable changes was the restoration of the normal way of activating plugins. Now, it won’t just sit there like a bump on a log. It will redirect like it should.

Bluehost Website AI. Bluehost has announced their own AI website creator. It is an addition to their “WonderSuite” software so you can “Let Bluehost AI Create Your WordPress Website In Minutes”. So, now they can help create you your boilerplate website… right before it proceeds to crash on their crappy hosting. Here’s the story.

FluentBoards is Officially Launched. The Fluent family of products officially has a new addition – FluentBoards. And it is currently available with a lifetime deal for a limited time (as is their standard launch practice). FluentBoards is basically a project manager for WordPress. Like having Trello inside your website, but you own all the data and have no limits at all.

50 WordPress Stats. The InstaWP blog published 50 WordPress Stats. WordPress powers 43% of websites, 474 million of them. There are more than 59,000 plugins in the official plugin repository, but 57% of them having no ratings at all…. meaning probably barely anybody uses them. As you might expect, the market tends to self-correct upward toward quality.

How Personalisation Can Drive Conversion and Increase Revenue. This is a talk from the WP London Meetup which you can watch on Youtube here. This is by Paul Halfpenny, creator of PersonalizeWP. I had never come across this plugin before and it does look interesting.

Site Simplicity = Speed = Conversions

Doing what I do, I obviously end up looking at and diving into a lot of different websites. And one of the things I come across fairly often is OVER-design.

It is like just because their theme or page builder COULD do something…. they did.

They probably thought those fancy whiz-bang things that slide around and animate and move would impress somebody. 😂 But, they just don’t.

Just the other day, for instance, I was on a company website and I was checking out their testimonials. Problem is, the testimonial were in this carousel slider and the damn thing would shift over automatically before I even had a chance to read the testimonial. And if I click the arrow to go back and try to read it again, it would STILL auto-shift to the next one.

Putting testimonials into sliders and carousels is an example of over-design. It might seem smart because you can fit more into less space, but in the real world it is a very user UN-friendly experience.

Another thing I see is sites with animated backgrounds or elements that animate into view as you scroll down the page. What’s the point of those things other than to give the site owner a warm fuzzy?

Don’t ever forget that just because something looks good to YOU doesn’t mean it works that way for other people.

For one, some design elements might look “pretty”, but harm conversions (and sales) because it gets in the way. Carousel testimonials are one such example.

Second, these design elements often just bloat up a page, harm site performance scores, and hence harm your SEO. Yes, literally… making a site “pretty” can hurt SEO in some cases.

Thirdly… these “fancy” things usually just break on mobile devices. They don’t work. So you end up either just having a site that works like crap on mobile… or you have to design an entirely different version specific for a mobile device.

So, beware of over-design. Lean toward simplicity when it comes to your website’s design.

Avoid a bunch of animation. It is pointless, anyway.

Be careful with background images. They can be overused and every image you use weighs down the page.

For gods sake, avoid testimonial sliders. Heck, any kind of slider. And ESPECIALLY if it auto-scolls. It bloats up the page and it is pretty unfriendly to real-world users on your site.

Modern page builders and themes enable us to do all kinds of things. But, really… in many cases, you’re better off not using it and just sticking to the basics.

Would you rather have a site that impresses a small minority of very visually focused people… or a site that SELLS things and makes you money?

Yeah, me too. 😎