Leveling up your relationship with WordPress with Terri Tutich is the topic of this LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Terri helps people with WordPress websites on a little of everything, from teaching people how to get set up to building full sites from scratch, as well as fixing and maintaining sites. She shares a wealth of knowledge in this episode with some best practices and tips for running a healthy WordPress site.
Making backups of websites is a strong point of emphasis for Terri. Plugins such as BackupBuddy or UpdraftPlus can be great solutions for backing up your website. Those tools do have pro versions with some more advanced features, but making sure you always have a backup of your website for an emergency is crucial for situations such as getting hacked or installing a new theme or plugin that deletes or modifies your content.
Sadly, a lot of course creators fail when they get too in the weeds with their technology. Sticking with basic tools, and tools you know how to work with, may be the best strategy when initially getting off the ground. You can also work with someone on the technical aspects to build out your website or to teach you the basics of building it. But making sure you avoid getting hung up on the tech is key to getting your program off the ground.
Terri also shares the services she offers, starting from her basic plan of including backups and updates. That is the equivalent of having a car and having your oil changed. When Terri works with updates, she’ll test them on a staging site to make sure everything checks out and the site won’t break with the updates, and then she’ll run a backup and run updates on the live site. She also offers more premium services, such as setting up an entire site or teaching people how to work with their WordPress websites.
Terri hosts workshops where she’ll work one-on-one with people discussing the basics and best practices for running a website. She’ll also go over security issues with them, such as creating strong passwords and possible plugins to add for security. Terri walks people through what a staging site is and how they can utilize that to make sure they’re safe when updating.
To learn more about Terri Tutich and the services she offers be sure to head over to BeyondTheOffice.com. You can find her guide to website ownership there as well.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
This episode was sponsored by WP Tonic Managed WordPress LMS hosting. Click here to learn more, and use coupon code wptonichosting50 to save 50% on any annual plan.
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest, Terri Tutich from beyondtheoffice.com. Welcome to the show, Terri.
Terri Tutich:
Hey, thanks for having me. It’s great.
Chris Badgett:
This is going to be an episode about WordPress and how to level up and get the most out of it. Terri has been doing lots of different things inside the world of WordPress, but when somebody meets you, how do you describe what it is you do with WordPress?
Terri Tutich:
I usually use a terrible phrase like, I help people with their website stuff. I hate the word stuff, but I haven’t done a better word for it because it’s a little of everything. I do building sites from scratch, fixing sites, maintaining sites, teaching them how to use their sites, and I tend to get a lot of people get started with, “I did a thing and now it’s broken. Can you help me fix it?” So it’s a little of everything, it’s website stuff, it’s all of the things.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. If you are in the WordPress world, sometimes it’s easy to get inside the bubble, but when I go out and about, if somebody asked me what I do, I have my, “I have a software company, I help people build online schools.” If I’m talking to some somebody who’s inside WordPress already, I’ll say, “I have a learning management system plugin for WordPress,” but it’s very context specific and that’s one of the challenges with WordPress is it’s infinitely extendable and people have all these different configurations and that’s why you put together a website owner’s guide. You can check that out at beyondtheoffice.com and I love where you’re focusing in with beyond the beginner thing. You’ve got the site up, now what? What are some of the things that people can be working on to level up their WordPress website after the launch?
Terri Tutich:
Make a backup. That is one of the things that I … I like to say I’m a little bit neurotic about backup. That’s the thing that I’ve done for … I’ve done backup talks for some Word camps. We had a a mega meetup here in Pittsburgh, I did a lightning talk on it. I have seen so many problems that take forever to fix that could easily have been resolved if they just had a backup. So once you get the site exactly the way you want it or even if it’s close to the way you it and you’re working on it and you want to try new things, make a back up because sometimes it’s hitting the wrong button and you delete things.
Terri Tutich:
I’ve seen people delete the user that had all of the content associated with it and didn’t reassign that content to somebody else, and they deleted basically all of the content from their site. With a backup that takes 20 minutes to fix. Otherwise it takes an hour of me digging around in a database, trying to figure out how to get this stuff back out. Just make a backup. It’s the first thing.
Chris Badgett:
What do you recommend for backups, in terms of there’s different ways to do it? There’s the hosting level backup, if you have a higher end hosting, they do it automatically. There’s backup plugins. What do you recommend?
Terri Tutich:
I’ve been using Backup Buddy for years. I know it’s a premium plugin. I know there’s no free version of it, but it’s one of those things that once I tried it there was no going back to anything else because for me it works better. It works more seamlessly than everything else. I don’t trust only relying on the hosting backups because I’ve seen times where those have failed and in fact, at our mini meetup I was talking about this and we had somebody there representing a local listing company and he even agreed with me. He’s like, “The hosting backups are basically there for the hosting companies protection, not necessarily for yours.” They’re only keeping them for maybe five to seven days. A lot of times you’re not looking at your website every day. You’re not searching for your website on Google.
Terri Tutich:
There are times the problems go missed for longer than five to seven days. If you’re only relying on that, that’s not a good backup solution. Plus if the hosting crashes, you have no backup anyway. So yeah, if you’re not using Backup Buddy, something that’s at least automated, that doesn’t require you going in and remembering to push a button every Friday to make the backup and send it somewhere else. Something that can be automated, something that can be scheduled or use a maintenance service. Have somebody do it for you just to make sure it gets done.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. If you want to see a live demo of Backup Buddy, we did a webinar training with somebody from iThemes, if you go to the bottom of LifterLMS.com and click on webinars, you’ll find it. Maintenance. You offer maintenance services for WordPress websites.
Terri Tutich:
I do.
Chris Badgett:
Let me just back up and say an issue we talk about on this podcast with almost every guest is what I call the five hats problem, which, in order to have a successful online course or training based membership website, you have to be five people at once. You have to wear these five hats, which is almost an impossible task. You have to be, number one, an expert in something. Number two, you have to be able to teach. You have to be a teacher. Number three, you have to be able to build community both before the sale and after the sale.
Chris Badgett:
Number four, you have to be an instructional designer, which means you need to take your expertise and actually organize it into a useful consumable a way. You have to have that skill. Number five is you have to be an entrepreneur and also a technologist. So I think I added an extra hat there. It might’ve been the instructional designer, because that goes inside of teaching, but you have to be an entrepreneur and then you have to be a technologist. Unfortunately I see a lot of course creators, coaches, trainers fail because they get too into the weeds on the technology when it’s really not their strong suit and they could have saved themselves by getting just a little bit of help, or billing somebody on their team or getting a maintenance thing so they’re not solely responsible for the website and they’re not an expert in WordPress. What do you offer for maintenance and how do you support website owners with your maintenance?
Terri Tutich:
So the very basic level that I have literally is just backups and updates. It’s the bare minimum of what I consider taking care of your website. If you had a car, that’s the equivalent of remembering to get your oil changed when you need to. It’s really the lowest bar, but it’s backups, it’s updates. Then with that I’m testing the updates so when I apply them and make sure it doesn’t blow up the website and if it does, we figure out why so it can be fixed
Terri Tutich:
Trying to make sure that it’s speed optimized and that it’s secure and stuff like that so that you’re not going to get hacked so that we don’t have to fix your website every other week. So that’s all stuff I said. Like I said, that’s just the bare minimum. Then I have, we’ll say the next level, I also offer some time to work on the sites each month. So some people are really comfortable putting in their own blog posts, but they don’t want to have to deal with backups and whether or not it’s secure and stuff like that. Some people want to just be able to email it. Here’s my blog post, put the pictures up, make my Pinterest graphic for me, do that stuff.
Terri Tutich:
So I’ll do that, and then I have the upper plan that includes hosting, that includes security, that includes working on it. We’ll do brainstorming sessions once a month. We’ll talk about ways that we can go further with it, more proactive, not like business partnering, but I work with a lot of different businesses. I’ve seen lots of different things that work. I can give people ideas for what they might want to try to implement in their business to help achieve their goals.
Chris Badgett:
That’s an advanced tip I just want to throw out there. If you are building WordPress sites for clients, your clients are not in the witness protection program. So when you talk to them, if you put that in your package and you’re the expert, and if you see an opportunity to improve their website or fix something that they may not even realize, it generates work for you and you become a trusted advisor, not just a vendor. So that’s cool. I love seeing that you put that brainstorming feature into your maintenance plan. I think that’s really smart.
Chris Badgett:
You’re also a trainer, so we’re actually going to shift for a second outside of the technology hat and talk about workshops that you’ve run in person where you’re teaching website stuff. There’s a couple things I wanted to just couch before we get into that. Number one is sometimes course creators and membership site people, trainers, they get a little isolated and insulated and are creating from home with no feedback loop, no live people around. They’re trying to automate everything down to the four hour work week. They miss opportunity of getting out in front of real people and even sharing their love or their passion with their local community. They get into this online business of a global multinational startup thing, but just doing something locally can be pretty powerful.
Chris Badgett:
Then there’s also the concept of blended learning where maybe you teach them stuff online and then you have some stuff in person. That’s a cool concept, and there’s something really making waves called the flip classroom, where essentially you teach online and then the in-person thing, you’re more or less just there to support and coach and find out where people got stuck and just facilitate. So you’re flipping the classroom model and the homework model upside down. Tell us about your workshop experience. I love that you get out into the world and do that. Why do you do it? How does it work? What have you taught? Sorry, that was five questions at once.
Terri Tutich:
That’s okay. That’s okay. I have kids, I’m used to answering five questions at once. It just goes with it. So a couple of years ago I was talking to somebody who works with the library and I mentioned that I do training and stuff and they were basically, “I think we have people through the nonprofit center that the library runs that were interested in this.” Because a lot of nonprofits use WordPress sites and it tends to be that the management of the website falls on the desk of the person who seems to be the most techie, even if they know nothing about websites. Like, “You know how to work your smart phone. Here, now you get to use the do the website.” So these are people that don’t have a background in anything related to websites.
Terri Tutich:
Maybe there’s the marketing person or things like that. So they can write great content, getting it onto the site and maintaining the site, knowing what the different error messages mean, all of that stuff is totally over their head. So I did a workshop a couple years ago, started with one for the nonprofit center and we had people from maybe 20 different nonprofits there, and it was a very unstructured workshop. It was a three hour workshop. I did some beginning explanation on the different components of the website, just for some general understanding. I had some slides ready, but we didn’t really use them. I basically just jumped into my sandbox site and started showing them different things because I’ve always believed, especially with websites, a lot of people just learn better by watching it. So I showed them how to do different stuff, and then I just took questions. So it was, well, on our site, we have this theme and we have Divi and how do I do this? We are hosted with these people. How do I do X, Y, Z ?
Terri Tutich:
We talked about how WordPress has so many different variables. So you’re dealing with people that nobody there is using the same team as somebody else and everything is different, so I can’t really do a structured workshop in that. Well, if I was doing a workshop on how to build a course using LifterLMS, sure, that can be way more structured because it’s very specific. But this was just how to help maintain your website for nonprofits and so there’s a lot of interest in it, but so many different variables, so you can’t really super structure those. I actually really enjoy those because I like to see the variety of questions that people are getting, the different [inaudible 00:13:13] that people are using, how people are implementing things in different ways.
Terri Tutich:
I just enjoy digging into the different kinds of problems and figuring out solutions. So I like doing that. I did that for probably once a year for a couple of years, and then they’ve restructured how they do that. So I did one this past February and next year I’m going to be doing an evening one in the summer. I’m not really sure how that’s going to go. They merged the nonprofit and the business centers, so that one’s going to be open to a little bit of both, so that’ll be interesting to see how that works.
Chris Badgett:
Nice. Nice. You mentioned in our pre chat before the show, teaching through what I call simple rules or principles because sometimes people have all these different tools that do different things and really they need to get some core foundational concepts. Can you tell us some of how you do that and some examples of that, where it just doesn’t really matter so much and how you can specialize but you don’t have to?
Terri Tutich:
So yeah, in the workshops and when I’m working with one on one with people, I spend a lot of time talking about the basics, the best practices. So making sure you’re on decent hosting because that plays a lot into security and site speed and all kinds of other things. Making sure you have a backup plan, even if it means that every Friday morning, friends logging and running a backup. If that’s what the plan is and that’s working for you, that’s fine, but have a plan. We’ve talked about basic security stuff, not using stupid easy passwords, just going over some of the basics from security standpoint. Because there’s a lot of those things too where somebody may be set up the site five years ago, but security has changed in five years and the tools available for backups have changed in five years. So what’s current?
Terri Tutich:
We talk about what a staging site is and how you can create one and why you need one before you start doing major changes. We talk about child themes. A lot of that is introducing concepts to them that they may not be familiar with before that that are really helpful just to the overall understanding of what they’re doing. What the little update wheel means and why you should do updates. But do a backup first, which I say probably 20 times when I’m doing these workshops. Then we’ll go over some basics of maybe what is SEO? What is a call to action? Why do you want to have your register now maybe as a button instead of a link? Just some basic things to help them be thinking in a different way about what they’re doing on the websites to make it more user friendly, to make it work better for them.
Chris Badgett:
Keep listening. This podcast is not over. This is just a special message about this episode sponsor WP-Tonic Managed WordPress LMS Hosting. Think of it as everything you need to have a professional online course training platform right out of the box, ready to go. Find out more about WP-Tonic’s Managed WordPress LMS Hosting by going to lifterlikes.com/tonic. Now back to the show.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. I have a question about the problem in our industry. It’s a big problem, which is that unfortunately a lot of people, they do some work or somebody helps build the WordPress website and then they, it’s called going dark or they disappear, they stop replying to emails. In the worst scenarios that actually happens halfway through the project build and they just disappear. I’m not sure I understand quite why or that problem so bad, but I know when I did a lot of work with clients, a lot of times you’re starting at a place of where you have to earn the trust because they had a bad experience with the last person they worked with. You obviously show up and you’re willing to make a commitment if they’re going to do a plan with you, but what would your advice be to WordPress professionals who maybe don’t realize that that’s a big differentiator in the space and how can they make that relationship a huge success and avoid that? What causes people to disappear? I don’t know if you have any theories on that or whatever.
Terri Tutich:
Well, I’ve had clients come to me. “I used to have a web guy and I can’t get ahold of him anymore and I need to update something.” “So and so told me about you,” or “I found you online,” or whatever. So yeah, I’ve had lots of people come to me and I think in some of the cases, somebody may be freelancing to pay the bills for a while and then they take a full time job and they just let their freelancing site go away without telling people that they’re going away and it seems they just disappear. I get that from the financial motive of it, but if you had been working with people, I feel it’s nice to at least let them know. Be like, “Hey, by the way, I’m doing this other thing now.” Even if you’re not referring them to somebody else, let them know that you’re not going to be around anymore so that they don’t think you disappeared and they’re wondering what happened to you.
Terri Tutich:
I don’t know. I’m in a bunch of different Facebook groups related to web design and entrepreneur and stuff. I just try to figure out what people have questions about, help out where I can. One of the things I see a lot though is that there’s a lot of web developery people that are like, “Oh well, that one’s not worth my time anymore. I got the big money out of them for the project.” So they just ghost them. So whether or not they’re still there, they just stop replying to the emails, which I think is a little bit shady, or a lot shady. At least let them know or give them some excuse like, I don’t have time for it or whatever. Just don’t disappear.
Terri Tutich:
But as far as how I go to help people to trust me after all of that. So as it says on my website, you were looking at my website earlier, I translate web problems into solutions. I’ve had a lot of people telling me that I’m really good at translating the techie speak into words that everybody else understands. I talk to them just the same way I’m talking to you. The language that I use, I feel conveys that I know the technical stuff without getting stuck in the land of jargon where they don’t understand what I’m saying. So it tends to find a nice balance between making them feel comfortable in my skill without feeling like I’m talking down to them.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a huge thing. That’s a huge thing and I’m just looking at your website now and I love your service feature boxes or whatever. It says, “Which best describes your need or what you need help with? I need a new website. My website needs care. I want to add things to my site. I want to learn WordPress.” These are all very conversational way the clients talk. That’s what they would say. They don’t say, “I need a PHP plugin CSS something. They’re like, “I need some help.”
Terri Tutich:
My hosting company said I need to update my PH what now? Yeah, I get emails from random people too that are like, “Oh, Jane said I should email you. What does this mean?” I’m okay with that because I feel if I can be the approachable web developer that they’re talking to, I’m good with that.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. Also when there’s a … What’s the word? An information advantage. If you’re the expert, the last thing people want to feel is they can’t communicate with you or you’re talking down to them or something like that. It’s just no way to business. So it’s important to be sensitive, very sensitive to who you’re talking to.
Terri Tutich:
Right. Like when the mechanic starts saying, there’s a harmonic synthesizer whatzit’s problem. My dad used to be a mechanic, so I’m familiar with a lot of the words, but even when they started talking to me and I’m like, “Could you just explain what actually needs to happen?” I think a lot of people like to throw out the big words because they feel it makes them sound more knowledgeable. But I feel it also makes them sounds less empathetic towards their customer because if they don’t understand, if they can’t use the same words that their customers using, the customer just doesn’t relate to them as well.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, and another tool for getting better at that is being problem focused and solution focused, not tool focused. Your language of, I need a website, my website’s broken or needs care or whatever, these are all just problem focused and solution oriented statements.
Terri Tutich:
Right. I don’t have one favorite theme or one favorite plugin, with the exception of Backup Buddy, that I use for everything. I’ve worked on a bunch of different themes. I’ve worked on a bunch of different form plugins. I’ve worked with a bunch of different page builders. If a customer comes to me and says, “I need you to fix something on my site,” and they’re already using a specific thing, I’m not going to make them switch to something else just because that’s what I’m more comfortable with. It’s what’s working for them. I’m not going to redo everything just to make me feel more comfortable.
Terri Tutich:
I actually saw somebody, they had somebody build their site. That person was no longer available for whatever reason, they started working with somebody new and he installed a second page builder on their site because he didn’t know the first one. So half of their pages were in one and half of their pages were in the other and it took forever to load because now you have so many more resource files that are being loaded with everything because it’s loading stuff for two page builders. I’m like, this is a terrible idea. But it all came down to, I don’t want to figure out how to do it with A, so we’re just going to make everything in B, but push them both together. I don’t think it works.
Chris Badgett:
Those are two very different mindsets. Are you trying to help a client? Are you an Elementor specialist or Divi specialist or Beaver Builder specialist? Really, if you just ask yourself what’s in the best interest of the client. It’s fine if you specialize and you’re like, “I’m an expert in these tools.”
Terri Tutich:
Absolutely.
Chris Badgett:
That’s fine, but if you’re going to help a client, what’s in their best interest is not the have three page builders going at once because that … Maybe you shouldn’t take that client if you want to draw that line in the sand, which you have every right to do. I wanted to ask you, it sounds like you get local referrals and you do stuff in your community. What’s your split or how do you approach doing work locally in your community versus anybody who finds you on the internet? How do you relate to that? Do you care? Are you trying to be a local shop? I remember meeting somebody when I lived in Montana, which I don’t live there now, and they’re like, “I only do clients that are within this region.” At the time I was doing clients all over the world. One’s not right or wrong, but how do you do it?
Terri Tutich:
I like to work with different people and different systems and stuff like that. I don’t really have a preference. I do like working with local people because it’s fun to know we have some of the same reference points. I know that a lot of people from a customer perspective like to find somebody that is local to them because they feel more comfortable with it. There is the potential someday if we really had to, we could meet at a coffee shop. They just feel that proximity makes them feel more comfortable with me. So I do have my location, my city, in some of my SEO because I want people to know where I’m at. But I’ve also worked with people literally all around the world. I picked up a customer a couple of years ago because he was looking at one of the YouTube videos on how to clone your site.
Terri Tutich:
He messaged me and he’s like, “Right, I don’t want to do that. Can I just hire you?” He was somewhere in South America. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s cool. As long as you can pay me in us dollars because the whole conversion thing with the bank, that’s a pain in the neck.” But yeah, I don’t have a preference as to where people are as long as we can work together.
Terri Tutich:
I think that’s the thing that’s important for a lot of things too, is that people have different personalities, people have different work styles. The way I talk to people, I find that it tends to put my clients at ease, but some people maybe really want the person who’s going to use all the tech speak because they’re more comfortable with that and that’s not me. You’re welcome to go work with them and whatever. I don’t have a preference. I just want us to be able to get along well with each other. If you’re not going to respect the way I run the business or the way I run my life, and if I can’t respect the way you run your business, that’s not going to work out. I’m just flexible.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. I also just wanted to pull out something you said just in case anybody missed it, which is that you made some YouTube videos about how to do something. That is exactly how I started as a WordPress freelancer. My whole WordPress journey started just by me putting videos on YouTube about how to do stuff with WordPress. Next thing you know, I’ve got clients and they’re coming in through my videos. So even if you’re a website builder, if you’re a course creator, an expert, the power of YouTube to connect people is really amazing.
Chris Badgett:
Also in case you didn’t know, first of all, if you’re using YouTube for that purpose, you should put a link to your website or how to contact you in the description of the video. But also most YouTubers, if you go to their About tab on their YouTube channel, you confirm that you’re not a bot and then it will show you their email address. So you can connect. YouTube is really powerful for connecting people at scale. I think for WordPress it’s amazing. I don’t know how many videos about WordPress are on YouTube. It’s a never ending opportunity because [crosstalk 00:28:19]
Terri Tutich:
Absolutely. Just because there’s already a million videos on the topic that you want to make a video on does not mean you shouldn’t because somebody going to connect with the way you say it. I totally just lost my train of thought. Oh, well.
Chris Badgett:
Another thing too is if you’re like, somebody has already done the Backup Buddy YouTube video or whatever, first of all, there’s only one you. Second of all, if you want to make it, how do you stand out? Put the year on the title. There you go. This technology is always changing.
Terri Tutich:
Oh, that’s what I was going to say is, some people do like learning in different ways. I actually prefer to read a blog post instead of watching a video. But some people really want to be able to watch the video where they have it playing on their phone or on another screen while they’re working on stuff so that they can see two happening. So some people are great at writing stuff, some people are great at making videos, but it takes all different kinds of people and you’re going to connect with somebody that really likes the way you do it.
Chris Badgett:
Totally. Totally. Can you just take people to school on how WordPress meetups, what they are and what Word camps are and how that works?
Terri Tutich:
Sure.
Chris Badgett:
Because some people listening to this or watching this on YouTube may not be aware of this community that exists probably in their area.
Terri Tutich:
So meetups are local groups of WordPress users, developers, fans that they get together, we’ll say, periodically. Some meetups are more active than others. Here in Pittsburgh we typically do one meetup a month. It’s in the center of the city. Then I was running another meetup that usually tried to meet in the northern part of the city because we have a lot of bridges and tunnels and people don’t want to cross rivers and I don’t understand but whatever. So we tried to do it in two different locations, because Pittsburgh’s a big city, and what I was finding was there was a lot of people that really couldn’t make it to the second location, but there was a lot of interest in doing them online. So we’ve been doing some online meetups that are still our Pittsburgh meetup.
Terri Tutich:
We still have people from Pittsburgh, but then we also then have people coming from outside of Pittsburgh, which is cool. So we had Michelle Frechette from New York was talking about 404 pages. So she’s in New York, she’s not going to drive all the way Pittsburgh to share her information with our meetup, but we were able to get her on Zoom. It’s just a way to share what you know or get help with a problem you have that’s been really a lot of a common suggestion. If people are new to WordPress, don’t have a whole lot of budget maybe to hire somebody, go check out a meetup and see. There’s probably one in a city near you and you can get information on it.
Terri Tutich:
The way we run our meetups is we try to have a topic each month so that we’re talking about something specific. But sometimes we also do, having bar style meetups where it’s basically just come and bring your question and we’ll see if we can answer it. So we get everybody from people that just heard about WordPress last week to developers to representatives of plugin companies and a little bit of everything. So you get a good mix. There’s just bunch of different personalities. I really like the meetups.
Terri Tutich:
The Word camps are basically localized conferences related to all things WordPress. It covers literally all things WordPress, it covers blogging, it covers development, it covers using it. We’ve had people come and talk about accessibility. We’ve had people talk about SEO. Any topic vaguely related to websites with WordPress, you might find that. The first year we had a Word camp in Pittsburgh, one of the speakers was an intellectual property attorney talking about digital rights and why you can’t just grab an image off of the Google image search and stick it on your blog post. So Word camps happen in different cities, literally all around the world, and if you’re new to this concept, go to wordcamp.org and find one that’s happening close to you. They’re can be one day, sometimes they’re are two days, sometimes there’s one track, sometimes there’s multi tracks. Every one’s a little bit different. But from where I’m at in Pittsburgh, there’s probably five or six within a one day’s driving distance from here. So if I really wanted to talk to a whole bunch of WordPress people, I have my opportunities to do that.
Chris Badgett:
That is awesome. I was just pulling it up on meetup.com. It looks like there’s 1,621 WordPress meetups out there. They’re everywhere.
Terri Tutich:
Those are the only the official WordPress meetups that are officially sanctioned by WordPress. There’s a bunch of other ones. We had one popped up in Pittsburgh that only lasted a year or so that was WordPress and other stuff but wasn’t officially sanctioned one. Sometimes there’s related ones as well.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. For some people, we were discussing the difference between working with a web person locally versus just working with somebody somewhere else in the world. Both options are possible, but it’s for a lot of people they like to know that they can meet their tech person, they can run into them at a WordPress event and they’re also in the same time zone so when they communicate … I’ve had clients in Australia and it’s painful because I’m often doing a meeting at 7:00 at night. They’re getting up early. There’s a lot to be said for getting outside of the building and connecting with your WordPress community.
Chris Badgett:
Terri Tutich from beyondtheoffice.com. Go check out this site and check out her guide on website ownership. Really focused on what to do after the launch. If you’re looking for a WordPress person, check her out, and if you are a WordPress person, check out what she’s doing. I think you’re doing a lot of amazing things here right, and inspiring the community for people to empathize more with the customer, create a offer that really surrounds the customer, is more focused on them than it is on you. Then your communication style is awesome in a way that attracts people, isn’t intimidating and easy for a prospective customer to understand. Terri, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Is there any final words you have for the people?
Terri Tutich:
Backup your website. If you don’t know when the last time you backed it up, go do that now. Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results getting courses on the internet.
