A Community That Transcends Labels

[ad_1] Here is Katie reading her own story aloud. WordPress has changed my life in so many ways. This is the story of how I discovered WordPress and used it to build a business that gives me financial freedom and a flexible lifestyle.  It’s the story of how the unique nature of the WordPress community has allowed me to achieve my dreams, without the obstacles and prejudices which are common in other industries.  It’s the story of how I haven’t achieved this “despite” being a woman founder and a mother. And how it wasn’t “because of” these things either. Instead, it was because of the incredible WordPress community which transcends these labels.  The Beginning – Building a Career Without a Goal I’ve always been extremely motivated and hard working, getting top marks at school and University. However, as a child I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Everyone around me seemed to have specific ambitions to work towards. My sister wanted to be a doctor. My Mum had always wanted to be a doctor too. My Dad had always wanted to be a TV producer. And surprise surprise, they all achieved those goals.  But I was different, as I had never seen a job that I wanted to do. It felt like there was something wrong with me. Careers advisors tried to force me into a category. This was normally very basic, for example: “You’re good at writing, you should be a journalist” – regardless of the fact that I obviously didn’t have the right personality type for that.  However, it didn’t really matter because I was hard working enough to do well at whatever I tried, and I didn’t feel I needed a specific purpose – whatever other people thought. I chose my favorite subjects to study at University (English Literature and Philosophy), focussing on the skills it would give me rather than what career it would lead to. And when I graduated in 2002, I applied for a range of jobs where I felt like I had the required skills. It took about 20 attempts, but eventually I got a job offer.  I didn’t enjoy my first job, which was being a Technical Writer for a software company. After that, I got a job as a Trainee Manager for a relatively small company – and that’s when things started to get interesting. I discovered that by being enthusiastic and showing my potential, I could mould the job around my skills rather than the other way round. I’m good at research and writing, so the company gave me responsibilities in those areas and let me take over the company newsletter, communication and marketing.  Since then, every role I’ve had (including at Barn2) has evolved around my skills and experience. This makes it much more interesting, as well as more useful to the company! I realised that you don’t need a specific career goal. Instead, you can just focus on what you’re good at and where your interests lie, and everyone benefits.  The Drive to Do More When I started my career, I absolutely did not have the skills or independence to start my own company. The UK education system does nothing to encourage budding entrepreneurs, or even to acknowledge entrepreneurship as a possible career option. My path had always been to go to University and then “get a job”.  However, it was the early 2000’s and the world was changing. I could see the internet taking the world by storm and creating opportunities that had never existed before. I enviously watched people who were becoming successful by building innovative online businesses. I didn’t just want their success – I wanted the flexible lifestyles that they were achieving by working for themselves.  My husband Andy and I talked endlessly about how we wanted to stop working for other people and start a business together. However, neither of us were big risk-takers or “big ideas” people. As a result, we stayed in our jobs for the rest of our 20’s, feeling more and more fed up and longing for more freedom.  Discovering WordPress While Becoming a Mother Eventually, in 2009/10 we agreed for Andy to quit his job to start a web design company. The plan was for him to do the technical work, while I would do the marketing, content and SEO alongside my main job. My salary was just about enough to support both of us through the early days, so while it was the biggest risk we had ever taken, it wasn’t a huge gamble. While Andy was a Senior Software Developer, he had to teach himself web design and PHP. We chose to start a web design business because it felt like an easy market to enter, and would nicely combine his technical abilities with my business and marketing skills. We didn’t have the confidence to start a business that required large upfront investment or a higher level of risk.  While our initial focus was designing websites for small local businesses, Andy discovered WordPress during our first project. He immediately realized that it was the best way to build any type of website. I remember being sceptical when he first told me about it because it sounded like a template-based blogging platform, but he was absolutely right! We used it for all our clients’ websites.  In 2011, our daughter Sophia was born. Surprisingly, being a mother actually helped me to build the business. Andy and I had felt comfortable reducing our income to one salary, but it was much scarier for us both to quit our jobs. After all, that was the point where our finances would be completely reliant on the business.  Fortunately, becoming a mother eased this transition because my income naturally reduced during my year’s maternity leave. My parents were amazingly helpful while Sophia was a baby, giving me the opportunity to breast-feed every couple of hours while working on the business in between (and often at the

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WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels Plugin Review/Tutorial (2021)

[ad_1] Have a WooCommerce store and wish to stand out from other merchants selling online? Try adding product labels. Product labels are a great way to showcase important details about your product, display special offers, and highlight ongoing sales in your store. And if you brighten them up with eye-catching colors and interesting graphics, they’ll look pretty dang appealing to anyone who visits your store. Today, we’re going to explore the capabilities of a plugin that makes it simple to add and manage product labels. Its name? Advanced Product Labels. WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels is a powerful WordPress plugin by BeRocket offering a range of attractive templates, label content options, advanced styling, and more. It’s designed to help you improve conversions by making products dynamic, engaging, and noticeable. It’s hard to describe the label effect with just text, so you can check out the plugin in action here and here to see what I mean. These are live examples of what Advanced Product Labels helps you create. The plugin has almost 30,000 installs and has been on the market since 4 years. In our hands-on WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels review, I’ll give you a detailed look at how this plugin works and how you can use it to add labels to your products. WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels Review: The Feature List In a nutshell, BeRocket Advanced Product Labels is a product personalization, and enhancement tool specifically built for WooCommerce and WordPress. It helps you create product labels that stand out on your site with features like: Article Continues Below 50+ ready-to-use templates, including customizable CSS templates, discount timer templates, and image templates Various content types and product conditions Label style options like font color and custom label borders Opacity & Gradient modification and shadow effect The tool also lets you choose the type of label you want to add to your products. For example, you can select the “In title” label to place the label to the right or left side of the product title. As BeRocket Advanced Product Label is a WooCommerce-specific tool, it plays nicely with the core WooCommerce installation. All you have to do is install it on your WordPress WooCommerce site, permit it to access your WooCommerce functionality via the WordPress API, and you’re good to go. Hands-On with BeRocket Advanced Product Labels Now, let’s dive in, and I’ll show you how the different features of WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels work. 1. Creating a New Label To get started, you open up your WordPress dashboard and click BeRocket → Advanced Labels. Your next step is to add a label. To do so, click the Add Label button beside the Advanced Labels heading at the top of your screen. BeRocket will now redirect you to an area where you’ll find tools to create a new custom label from scratch. First, you’ll enter a title for your label. You could write “Sale” or “Bestseller” depending on how you wish to promote your items. Then, you can choose from the 17 conditions available for your product label. At this point, you can decide if you want to mix conditions using “AND” or “OR” operators. When creating a Sale label for my product, I selected On Sale as the first condition and Page ID as the second condition. Then I used the AND operator to form a relation between the two. Next, go to Advanced Label Settings and pick a template you want to use for your label. As you do that, BeRocket will give you options to hide the label on mobile, tablet, and/or desktop. Check the box for the device you don’t want the label to appear on. You also get to select from 8 content types for the label: Article Continues Below Depending on the option you choose, the plugin will modify the text, background image, and image title of the label. Once done, click Save to create your new label. 2. Modifying a Label’s Style Not content with the existing style of your label? No problem – you can tweak it through the Style tab in Advanced Labels Settings. Let me show you how it’s done. First, I’ll create a new label, this time to showcase stock status. Then, I’ll click the Style tab and select a new background color. There’s a lot of options to play with. You can modify the font size, width, height, border radius, border width, and more for your label. Two options that stood out to me are Opacity and Shadow effects. Used correctly, these two effects can draw attention to your best deals. 3. Changing a Label’s Position Another neat option in the Advanced Product Labels tab is Position. This setting allows you to decide between keeping the label in its current position, putting it on the image, or placing it in the product title. Based on the option type of position you choose, BeRocket will let you adjust the label for the positions left, right, and center. You can also adjust the padding and margin of the label and rotate it as a part of an A/B test to see if a uniquely positioned label improves your conversions. 4. Using Tooltip BeRocket Advanced Product Labels also lets you create a tooltip. Also known as a hint or info tip, a tooltip is a graphical UI element that displays a text box containing information about an element when a user hovers over it. You can create a tooltip for any label to inform visitors about its function or convey what a particular abbreviation stands for. BeRocket allows you to enter the content you want to display and upload a custom tooltip image.  Article Continues Below The plugin also lets you decide whether you want the tooltip to appear or close after a delay, whether it should have a dark, light, or translucent style, and more. Further, you can adjust the tooltip for positions top, bottom, left, and right. Place it wherever you think your visitors are most likely to

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