[ad_1] Earlier this month WordPress.org meta contributors removed the active install growth chart from plugins, sending plugin developers who relied on this data into a state of dismay and outrage. The commit cited “insufficient data obfuscation” but there was no clear communication about when and where this decision had been made. Developers demanded more transparency around the charts’ removal but received no clear answers. Multiple opportunities to communicate the details behind the decision were deliberately forgone, as speculation mounted. Several contributors not directly involved in the conversations prematurely insisted it was removed due to a security or privacy concern, but Samuel Otto Wood has unequivocally confirmed that it was neither of these things. In a recent appearance on the WPwatercooler podcast, Wood elaborated on the decision, which he says was made in May through private channels via Slack DMs in a discussion initiated by Matt Mullenweg. “The reason is really quite simple,” Wood said. “It was removed because by and large, nobody was using them. Nobody was using the chart itself. By and large, the chart was not useful to the majority, and it didn’t really fit the purpose we had for it, that we had in mind when we implemented it.” Wood said the active growth chart was intended to just show growth or decline of a plugin on a weekly basis, but the data wasn’t working as intended: People wanted that feedback on whether plugin’s growing, whether it’s shrinking, et cetera. And that’s valuable information for developers to have, it’s valuable information users to know. But it really wasn’t working as that. The data that it provided was a percentage based data, and it was a very weak percentage based data. So by and large, the majority of use of that data was people scraping the data and using it to work backwards to the exact quote, exact numbers That was entirely the problem was that people were largely using it to get those numbers. Now, that’s not itself bad, but a, the reverse math didn’t work. It was wrong for a number of reasons, mainly because we were doing such a way obfuscating the data in such a way that it made that number wrong. Second, Actually, it’s kind of funny. It actually always gave numbers a bit too high, so it was giving people the wrong impression. Third, it really, people trusted it as an active number, as a number of active cells to the point where, to the point where they, they relied on it to make decisions and things like that. It was not a good idea. Although Otto was not involved in working on the project at the time, he was privy to the discussion and relayed some of the details: I read through all that discussion and we worked, they worked on it for a long, Scott and several people tried various things before removing it. They adjusted the values, they adjusted numbers. They, they went through a ridiculous amount of iteration and in the end, none of it worked. People were still using it even though it was giving them basically garbage. So finally removing it was the only thing to do. We did have a plan for replacing it. We just didn’t have a plan for replacing it immediately. Nevertheless, giving them active install count numbers that are wrong is more harmful, we felt, to both users and developers interests than simply not giving them at all. So that’s why it was removed. The concern podcast host Sé Reed and guest Matt Cromwell highlighted was that the decision was communicated in such a way that it suggested it was security related. Since it was not a sensitive security or privacy issue, Reed asked why was it handled in a private chat instead of the meta channel when the decision had such a profound impact on developers being able to track the trajectory of their plugins. Since the inaccuracy of the charts was well-known to those more intimately acquainted with the problem, Wood said its removal was “not quite the big deal” that everyone else ended up perceiving it to be. They did not anticipate the firestorm the charts’ removal would create in the trac ticket where developers were pleading to have them restored. “The physical visual chart itself is not so instrumental to the way I operate things,” GiveWP founder Matt Cromwell said. “But it’s the act of removing it without any conversation whatsoever. “And what does that mean for the long run of data about plugins on.org and the viability of their, of us, continuing to have them? That’s the real question. It’s an indicator of an underlying problem that isn’t getting better.” This incident has sparked discussions about what kind of partnership plugin developers should expect from WordPress.org, and whether it’s time they looked for support from one another instead of the platform, as Eric Karkovack suggested on The WP Minute. In light of plugin developers losing more valuable data that hasn’t been replaced, Alex Denning, managing director of Ellipsis, a digital marketing agency, makes the case that WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022. He contends that new WordPress plugins are not passing the 100k, 500k , or 1m+ install thresholds and the directory isn’t giving plugins organic reach. The focus of the ticket has changed from calling on WordPress.org to bring back the active growth charts to be more about brainstorming helpful plugin stats and insights that plugin developers would like to see. It is still receiving angry and frustrated comments from developers who believe the data should belong to the community. “I cannot emphasize enough that conversations about what to replace the active growth chart with should be happening in a public Slack channel or on a Trac ticket,” Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds said. “This data should belong to the community and the community should be able to participate in deciding how (or not) to display it.” The reasons that purportedly necessitate obfuscation have
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WordPress Documentation Team to Host Its First Online Contributor Day, October 25, 2022 – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress’ Documentation Team will be hosting an online Contributor Day on October 25, 2022, ahead of WordPress’ anticipated 6.1 release the following week. Milana Cap, who has been volunteering with the Documentation team for years and is currently sponsored by XWP, announced the event this week. “The primary goal is to catch up with a lot of tasks in the team’s backlog but also it’s an opportunity for all contributors to meet, collaborate in real time, and help onboard all new contributors who need any kind of help,” Cap said. The virtual event will be the first of its kind for the Documentation team but follows in the footsteps of other contributors teams, including the Polyglots and Accessibility teams, which have hosted wildly successful global events that include contribution and onboarding. These types of virtual gatherings help contributors get connected and put names to faces New contributors are encouraged to attend, even if it’s just for a short time to see what documentation contribution is all about. Cap requested everyone who plans to attend to leave their names on the GitHub issue dedicated to the Contributor Day. It outlines the steps to begin contributing and highlights a list of tickets awaiting content review for older documentation as well as more recent block editor and end user documentation tickets. For example, there is a project board specifically for high priority tickets remaining for 6.1. The Documentation team will be kicking off the event on Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 06:00 AM EDT and it will run for 10 hours. Attendees can join via Zoom and are not required to stay for any length of time. Category: News, WordPress [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress Themes Directory Adds Style Variation Previews – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress.org theme previews just got a major improvement this week with the addition of Style Variation previews. The previews now appear on block themes that include style variations. Themes that have more variations than what fits in the space beneath the preview pane will display all variations in a carousel with little arrows to navigate to the next ones. Here’s an example with the Pixl theme from Automattic that contains seven brightly colored variations: It’s also possible to see a selected style variation loaded into the theme preview now. Clicking the ‘Preview’ button will allow users to scroll and explore the theme with their selected style variation applied. “These style variations, designed by theme authors and packaged in block themes, help users have a diverse set of approaches to their site design allowing them to find one that aligns with their goals,” Automattic-sponsored Meta team contributor Steve Dufresne said. “This feature helps to highlight the flexibility of modern WordPress themes and it’s time to have it baked into the theme directory experience.” The new style variation previews are fetched from the themes’ /styles/{variation_name}.json files, so theme authors do not have to do anything to make the previews work. They will automatically display for any theme that includes style variations. Meta team contributors are also working on adding the ability to filter the directory for themes with style variations. Dufresne proposed creating a new style-variations theme tag as the simplest route towards implementing this. “Doing so will allow the active filtering of these themes without needing to make many if any code changes,” he said in the ticket‘s description. “A longer-term solution should look at exposing these features visibly somehow without needing to find the obscured filters that we currently have. This feature should be judged equally with others and therefore, this type of implementation should be better debated and falls out of the scope of this ticket and the immediate need to see themes with style variations.” This is a good observation, as not all WordPress users hunting for themes will know that a tag exists in the Feature Filter. That list is already quite lengthy and not the best user experience for discovering themes with specific features, especially if users don’t understand what the terms mean. Theme authors will want to watch this ticket. If the shorter term solution of creating a new style-variations tag is committed, they will need to update their themes with the tag to be included in the filtering. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingOpenverse Audio Catalog Passes 800,000 Files, Audio Support Now Out of Beta – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Openverse, formerly known as Creative Commons Search before it joined the WordPress project, has passed an important milestone with its support for audio files. The catalog has now indexed more than 800,000 audio files and its development team has taken audio support out of beta. Openverse visitors can now confidently search for and explore audio files for use in their videos, podcasts, or other creative projects, all available for free use under Creative Commons licenses. It is an incredible resource that is expanding and improving every day. Users can search on any device, but I found that Openverse audio searches and files are surprisingly easy to navigate on mobile. Search results can be filtered by permitted use, license, audio category, extension, duration, and source. Previewing works well and each file has attribution information readily available to copy. Clicking on “Get this audio” will take the visitor to the file on the external collection’s website where it can be downloaded. Deeper integration with WordPress core is on the roadmap for Openverse files. It would also be interesting to see WordPress’ core Audio block integrate access to Openverse, in addition to pulling files from URL or the media library, the same way the Image block allows users to browse Openverse. Gutenberg contributors are currently exploring how they can add basic Openverse integration to the inserter. Matias Ventura, lead architect of Gutenberg, has proposed adding a Media tab to the existing tabs for Blocks, Patterns, and Reusable blocks, which allow dragging and dropping content into the canvas. This would offer more convenient access to the media library while building pages. “The inserter panel should support the ability to drag media from the inserter into the canvas, including dragging into block placeholders to quickly update patterns and such with your own content,” Ventura said. “The Media tab would allow users to choose between categorized assets from the media library, and from Openverse.” Gutenberg engineer Nik Tsekouras created a PR with a prototype, basically a proof-of-concept, to explore how this might be implemented. Development is still in the exploration and early stages, but this looks like a promising new integration that would make it easy for WordPress users to tap into Openverse’s catalog of 600 million free creative works. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingA New Multipurpose Block Theme for WordPress – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Olive Themes, a relatively new independent theme shop, has released its third block theme on the WordPress.org directory. Arc FSE is a high contrast, multipurpose theme, designed to enable a broad range of flexibility through support for full-site editing features. The theme features the open source and exceptionally readable Poppins web font in various weights and sizes. The color palette is dark with a bright lemon-yellow accent color. It’s bold without being overly splashy, making it suitable for professional use cases. Arc FSE does not come with any style variations, but users can easily change the accent colors for buttons, headings, and anything else by editing the templates. The theme comes with 20 custom patterns, which make up different sections of the design. They are all conveniently grouped together under “Arc FSE” in the Patterns explorer, so you don’t have to hunt for the ones that belong to the theme. It includes full-page patterns for the home, about, services, and portfolio pages. There are also section patterns for things like the default footer, 404 page, a promotional video, sidebar, search cover block, services, and more. When first installing Arc FSE, the home page is set up to be nearly identical to the demo, making it easy for users to get started customizing. It would be helpful to have a style guide for the theme, but for the most part you get what you see with the demo for the free version. Olive Themes also makes a pro version, which includes additional features, WooCommerce support, and more blocks for things like testimonials and star ratings. Arc FSE is good option for businesses, agencies, foundations, or artists with portfolios. After less than a week, it’s already being used on more than 100 sites. The theme is available to download for free on WordPress.org. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress Accessibility Day 2022 Publishes Speaker Lineup – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress Accessibility Day is just one week away on November 2-3, and registration is still open. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds published an impressive speaker lineup with 40 speakers from 14 countries. She also noted that 40% of the event’s sessions have at least one speaker who identifies as living with a disability. WordPress professionals who want to learn more about creating accessible websites will want to attend, as the schedule is loaded with a wealth of educational presentations from well-known accessibility experts. Co-lead organizer Joe Dolson will start with opening remarks, followed by the keynote session from Nicolas Steenhout, an accessibility consultant and host of the A11y Rules Podcast. The 24-hour event will include practical sessions on Selling Accessibility to Skeptical Clients, Meeting WCAG 2 without rebuilding from scratch, and When and How to Write Alternative Text. Gary Aussant, Director of Digital Accessibility Consulting at Perkins Access, and Stephen Plummer, Creative Manager at the Perkins School for the Blind, will be presenting a session titled “Proof: Accessible websites can be beautiful too” that will debunk some of the common myths about accessible websites. They plan to show real examples of modern and engaging sites that also work well for screen readers, keyboard users, and sighted users. Full-stack developer Nikole Garcia and Annie Heckel, Electronic Information Technology Accessibility Manager at Cornell University, will give a session on Developing Accessibility-First WordPress Themes. Check out the schedule to browse the rest of the lineup and add the sessions you want to attend to your calendar. Registration is free and the event will be live streamed via YouTube with closed captions. [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading#48 – Christina Deemer on Making Digital Content Usable for People With Cognitive Disabilities – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Christina Deemer [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the show, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured soon. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there. So, on the podcast today, we have Christina Deemer. Christina is a senior UX developer at Lede, a company of the Alley Group, where she champions accessibility and headless WordPress in her work with publishers and nonprofits. She’s passionate about inclusivity and community and has spoken at a variety of events about the subject. Christina is autistic and brings her personal experience with neurodivergence and disability to bear in her work. At the recent WordCamp US, Christina gave a presentation called “embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities”. And it’s this talk, which is the foundation of the podcast today. In her description of the presentation, Christina wrote, “cognitive disabilities are among the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad category. However recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency”. In past episodes, we’ve covered website accessibility from some different angles, and today we focus on how the web might be experienced by people with cognitive disabilities. First, Christina talks about what the term cognitive disabilities actually means, and what it encompasses. It’s a wide range of things, and so we talk about how people may differ in the way that they access the web. Memory, over complicated interfaces and readability are a few of the areas that we touch upon. We also discuss what legislation there is in place to offer guidance to those wishing to make their sites more accessible, and as you’ll hear, it’s a changing landscape. Towards the end, Christina talks about her own late diagnosis of autism and how this shapes her experience of the web, particularly with auto-play content and when web design includes elements which flash or flicker. Typically when we record the podcast there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. This is the last of the live recordings from WordCamp US 2022, and you may notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I do hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links and the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so, without further I bring you Christina Deemer. I am joined on the podcast today by Christina Deemer. Hello. [00:04:14] Christina Deemer: Hello Nathan. [00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to have you on. We are at WordCamp US 2022. We’re upstairs in the media room, and we’ve got Christina on the show today because she did a presentation. Have you actually done the presentation yet? [00:04:27] Christina Deemer: Yes, I did it yesterday morning. I was lucky in that I got to get it over with early and then enjoy the rest of the conference. [00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go? [00:04:35] Christina Deemer: It went really well. It was a lot of fun. I had a really great audience. [00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice to hear. That’s good. The subject, I’m just gonna give everybody the title. That’s probably a quick way to introduce what we’re gonna talk about. The subject title was embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. So we’ll dive into that in a moment. Just before then, though, just paint a little bit of a picture about who you are and how come it is that you’re speaking at a WordPress conference particularly about this topic. [00:05:04] Christina Deemer: Okay. I am a career changer. I spent the first 12 years or so of my career working in arts management. Then I decided I wanted to do something very different, and I became a developer. And one of my early mentors introduced me to WordPress. So, the first projects that I worked on were WordPress sites. I wrote my first WordPress theme when I was 35, and just really enjoyed getting involved in the WordPress community. And from the beginning of my career, I’ve been very interested in accessibility for a wide variety of reasons. And it’s become a passion of mine. I really enjoy sharing knowledge about accessibility with people. I enjoy hearing people’s stories about accessibility. And recently there’s been a lot of work done on the standards around cognitive accessibility or accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, and that work has been really fascinating and I’ve wanted to share it with people. And that was how, the reason that I pitched this talk for WordCamp US. [00:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s great. The words cognitive disabilities, it probably makes a great deal of sense to you because you’ve parsed and you’ve said it many times. You fully understand it. Would you just run over a brief definition of what it encompasses? And I’m sure it’s not just one thing, maybe it’s a multitude of things. [00:06:28] Christina Deemer:
Continue reading2022 Web Almanac Performance Data Shows WordPress Sites May Be Overusing Lazy-Loading – WP Tavern
[ad_1] The last two chapters of the 2022 Web Almanac were released this week – Structured Data and Performance, completing the 729-page ebook of the report. The WordPress-specific chapter was published earlier this month with metrics that indicate adoption is growing. The Performance chapter was written by Etsy performance engineer Melissa Ada and Google web transparency engineer Rick Viscomi. Performance metrics in the chapter focus on Core Web Vitals (CWV), which Google introduced in 2020 and made a ranking signal in 2021. They used the public Chrome UX Report (CrUX) dataset for the report, which collects data from eligible websites – publicly discoverable sites with an undisclosed minimum number of visitors. Most of the data concerns the performance of the web as a whole over time, but the 2022 Web Almanac highlighted one specific concern regarding WordPress sites’ use of lazy-loading and its impact on LCP performance. Google defines Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) metrics as “the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.” Lazy-loading is a good thing when used correctly, but these stats strongly suggest that there’s a major opportunity to improve performance by removing this functionality from LCP images in particular. WordPress was one of the pioneers of native lazy-loading adoption, and between versions 5.5 and 5.9, it didn’t actually omit the attribute from LCP candidates. So let’s explore the extent to which WordPress is still contributing to this anti-pattern. According to the CMS chapter, WordPress is used by 35% of pages. So it’s surprising to see that 72% of pages that use native lazy-loading on their LCP image are using WordPress, given that a fix has been available since January 2022 in version 5.9. One theory that needs more investigation is that plugins may be circumventing the safeguards built into WordPress core by injecting LCP images onto the page with the lazy-loading behavior. Similarly, a disproportionately high percentage of pages that use custom lazy-loading are built with WordPress at 54%. This hints at a wider issue in the WordPress ecosystem about lazy-loading overuse. Rather than being a fixable bug localized to WordPress core, there may be hundreds or thousands of separate themes and plugins contributing to this anti-pattern. 2022 Web Almanac – Chapter 12: Performance Prior to WordPress 5.9, WordPress’ default of lazy loading implementation was causing slower LCP performance, because it had been applied too aggressively and was lazy-loading images above the fold. In 5.9, WordPress shipped a fix that more eagerly loads images within the initial viewport while lazy-loading the rest. That’s why results that show WordPress sites overusing lazy-loading are surprising. “Admittedly, ‘lazy-overloading’ a hard problem to solve,” Viscomi said in his Twitter thread analysis. “We don’t always know whether an image will be the LCP. WordPress core sets it on every image by default and uses heuristics to unset it. Nearly 3/4 of pages that natively lazy-load images are on WordPress.” In 2020, Viscomi remarked on how quickly the adoption of native image lazy-loading shot up after WordPress 5.5 was released in August of that year with images lazy-loaded by default. WordPress has been driving adoption of this feature, which is why any implementation “anti-pattern,” as Viscomi characterized it, has an outsized effect on the performance of the web. “What gives, WordPress?” Viscomi said. “My theory is that it’s not the core heuristics that are wrong, it’s the plugins. Also, keep in mind that the majority of pages that even use lazy-loading are WP. “To support the plugin theory, let’s look at custom lazy-loading of LCP: More than half of the pages that do it are built with WordPress. WordPress is ‘only’ a third of the web, so there’s clearly something going on with JS-based lazy-overloading in WP.” On WordPress.org there are multiple pages of performance, caching, and image and video optimization plugins that are using lazy-loading in some way. Plugin and theme developers who are using lazy-loading in their extensions may want to test their implementations to see if they are having a negative impact on LCP performance. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingGet Data Insights to Fuel Your Ecommerce Business
[ad_1] Do your customers zigzag between your ecommerce site, social media profiles, blog, and marketplace product listings? Then you probably find it challenging to gain insights that enable you to craft a personalized experience at scale. Personalized experiences are important—71% of consumers expect brands to deliver them. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Large b2C ecommerce brands know this and design systems to consolidate omnichannel data, which enables them to tailor experiences with better insights. While you may not have the resources to design such a system, you do have the opportunity to use software that offers the same level of access to your data as the big brands. Custimy is an all-in-one CDP software that provides small and medium-sized companies with the insights they need to fuel their customer experience. Its founders mixed extensive knowledge from the ecommerce and marketing world with a no-code approach, cloud solution, and artificial intelligence to create a customer data platform that blurs the lines between SMBs and enterprises.But exactly what data is used in Custimy? What are its salient features? How does it compare to a CRM? In this detailed Custimy review, I’ll give you all the answers and explain how you can use Custimy to build a better and stronger business. Custimy Customer Data Platform – Overview and Key Features Custimy is a robust CDP that provides the foundation to ensure that your customer data insights and analysis are consistent across all your channels, tools, or platform. It does this by tracking identifiers from your different channels and unifying them in the CDP. These identifiers are based on demographics, personal information, transactional data, and more. Many other CDPs base identifiers on device ID or cookie ID, but with third-party cookies being phased out, this is no longer a long-term or viable solution. Article Continues Below Custimy serves as the foundation of your customer data, enabling your teams and tools that use the platform to become more insightful. Here are some of its key capabilities: Acquire the right customers Typically, companies look at ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and POAS (Profit On Ad Spend) to evaluate the customer’s profitability. But these KPIs only offer a glimpse of the view, and you risk losing out on gaining the right customers. Custimy looks at customers’ behavior, traits, and lifetime value (LTV). It lets you identify your most valuable customers based on these KPIs and synchronizes segments automatically to your marketing channels. This automated, data-driven approach ensures the consistent acquisition of new profitable customers with an expected higher lifetime value. Retain existing customers Getting our customers to repurchase is not easy. That’s because it’s difficult to track their post-purchase behavior and determine when they are ready to buy. Custimy improves your odds of retaining customers by forecasting their buying propensity, identifying their behavior, and tracking their behavior and spending habits within your brand ecosystem (webshop, emails, socials, etc.). AI algorithms in Custimy update audiences for email flows and repaid targeting, making it easier to identify those ready to buy. This helps you avoid losing a customer to your competitors because you didn’t act when they were ready to purchase. Improve marketing results Data-driven marketing is all about ensuring the right customers are exposed to your brand, products, and categories. In other words, you need to feed your marketing channels with the necessary audience signals to outshine the competition and improve your ROI. Custimy helps you take an AI and Machine learning approach to building value-based audience segments. Additionally, it sends updated audience signals to marketing channels like Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, and Google Ads, allowing you to target the right customers at the right moment across their preferred channels. Moreover, Custimy’s CAPI (conversion API) integration allows you to reclaim your tracking and conversion ability. It presents opportunities you haven’t seen since iOS 14, tracking actions across your entire marketing funnel so you know where to tune them for maximum ROI. Minimize return rate Ecommerce return affects many more aspects of your business than you might think. Your logistics, customer support, and shipment provider all get an additional responsibility, while you lose out on a sweet sale. Ecommerce return affects many more aspects of your business than you might think. Your logistics, customer support, and shipment provider all get an additional responsibility while you lose out on a sweet sale. Ultimately, a high return rate will cause you to lose both profits and revenue. Minimizing these extra costs while keeping your revenue is key to growing your ecommerce business. With that knowledge, you can better decide where to increase product information, which items to stop advertising, or even what goods to completely cut out due to too many returns. Along the same lines, targeting customers with products they are more likely to keep can help you cut costs and keep money flowing into your store. Increase overall profits Custimy also provides complete insights into your products and first-hand knowledge of what customers are buying (and keeping) those items. With a few clicks, you can get insights that reveal your best-performing products. You can then allocate more budget toward them to boost your bottom line. Custimy Insights Cockpit Besides the above features, Custimy gives you a full picture of all your data by integrating every channel with customer touchpoints. It automates the whole process for you and ensures you can easily find all your KPIs in one place, i.e., Custimy Insights Cockpit. And with easy reporting, you save valuable hours spent on gathering data from different resources, consolidating them in a spreadsheet, and crunching numbers with disparate tools. Also, I loved that Custimy is easy to use and displays your whole business in numbers. Based on my experience using it, it’s really a no-code platform that empowers you to stay ahead of the game with key business insights. Say goodbye to the days of feeling lost in different tools or programs with your data siloed off. Custimy Data Is First-Party Data It’s no secret that third-party data
Continue readingPrivileged – HeroPress
[ad_1] Privileged! That’s one weird way to begin a story but that is where I will kick off. Do not be deceived! I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth nor did I miss a meal in a day, however, there are many others in the community who have a different story to tell. Cut! From the top… When you read most of the articles on this ginormous account of lives (HeroPress), one theme stands out, “WordPress allowed me to create the life I wanted” and my story does not differ from the others apart from the finer details. For most of my life, I have wanted to create a leveled playing field for others and myself. That is one lesson my parents labored to teach me; to consider others as well as myself. So for most of my dreamy childhood, I spent my tv-less afternoons contemplating building an orphanage or something that would help those who did not have the gifts/experience I had obtained in the universe. But how would I do this? I was privileged to go through school from Kindergarten to University (We shall skip the nitty gritty) and obtained a Bachelors in Commerce. That continues to debunk the myth that most IT enthusiasts (read “nerds/geeks”) have a computer science degree. I do not have one and having it might supercharge my ego so I have sunset-ted that idea. Rather, I have focused to push in a direction that one of my former employers highlighted. He said, “You will make a good product manager one day!”. And I am building some WordPress plugins projects to come soon. But let’s rewind to the earlier story. Yah! No CS degree. “But how did you get into the IT field?” you might ask. During my high school long vacation, I broke my sister’s work computer one fateful mid-morning. I had to fix it immediately. At that point in time, it was her life’s work. Luckily, it was just the operating system that was broken. I reinstalled it and that is how I learnt about how software worked. Coincidentally, that is how my passion for IT started. 2 years later, I secretly kept learning new things, HTML but Javascript completely threw me off. So I focused on HTML and CSS which allowed me to make some pocket change while I went through university. I had many corporate clients who sought me out in my university hall for a website. So I studied 8am-1pm and worked in the afternoons and evening. This allowed me to save up for my first rental fees for when I left school. (Plays evil music with a surreptitious wink) Around 2009, one of my mentors in the web development game, challenged me to convert a PSD to WordPress because the client wanted to DIY the changes on their site overtime without need for a technician. As a reward, he would reward me for the hard work more than I had ever earned. He specifically asked for WordPress. I was lost in a new world. My thoughts only run around the idea that one could D.I.Y. I was a business major, not a database guy. I had no PHP knowledge besides googling up how to make a contact form and linking the form fields. That is how I knew how to make websites. This new task had so many challenges. It led me to learn all the theme and plugin basics from the WP repo but all the themes in the repo did not match what the graphics designer had made. I was toast! We lost the contract because of learning and doing time constraints, but I was now on a new path. Sigh! That is how I met Chris Coyier, Jeffery Way, Tom McFarlin and Morten Rand-Hendriksen in that order. Like I said, “I was privileged”. I had the industry leaders show me the way via their video tutorials. Chris taught me how to convert PSD to HTML with WordPress PHP via custom themes. Jeffrey taught me how to make plugins. Cementing my PHP and Code architecture. Tom taught me about making admin pages with options. Morten showed me how to make things mobile and styling complex menus. Google introduced me to stack overflow and the numerous WordPress blogs I am thankful for. (Sniffs with tears) Yes, I am not particularly talented but a good copycat. I followed what they did and deviated a little bit making solutions for my clients and myself. I learnt pretty fast and that is how I honed my current skill. I kept challenging myself and now I blog about the solutions and have since started a Youtube channel to freely share the knowledge I have attained over time. Privilege! Such an elite word with a capital P Dangit! For some it comes in different shades, others societal class, others in the life growth patterns. Why do I highlight this? It is because one never sees it unless they take time to meditate and be thankful for what they have. Some Context For context, I live in Uganda (East Africa) just on the outskirts of Kampala, its city. With over 70% of the 45 million people as youth and above 87% are unemployed. 25% of the entire population is impoverished (US$0.88–US$1.04 per person per day as the national poverty line. This measure is much lower than the World Bank’s international figure of US$1.90 ). So some of the underrepresentation challenges in the west are multiplied tenfold. Yes, Privilege! My education really set me up. I went to “good” schools which gave me more opportunities. Through hard work, I got a government scholarship at university which allowed me to study in the morning and work in the evenings. In contrast, the privately sponsored students had a mixed schedule with no wiggle room. So when I was finally leaving school, WordPress had already set me up with a job. I was a freelance web developer with WordPress experience. From then,
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