The State of WordPress For Publishers With Alex Price – S2 EP 16

Alex Price, Founder of 93digital, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing. Alex discusses the state of WordPress for publishers as well as his company 93digital, which is a leading London enterprise WordPress agency that empowers ambitious marketing and content teams to reach success goals.

Episode Highlights: 

• Alex Price introduces what 93digitial is and offers. 
• Why did Alex decide to focus on WordPress? 
• How does 93digital work with the different forms of WordPress like VIP and open source?
• How does Alex view the current landscape of CMS platforms?
• What types of publishing content builds is Alex coming across? 
• What are the common mistakes for website relaunches?  
• How does Alex see the role of 93digital on a client’s team? 
• What are the common pain points that mid-sized publishers come to them with?
• What are Alex’s thoughts around website expansion and tags? 
• Are there any hacks for automation that clients use to expand their efforts? 
• Which things that clients do make it harder to manage their websites?
• Out of the box page builder solutions are best to be avoided.  
• How many are too many plugins?
• What is his favorite plugin?
• What is Alex’s favorite theme? 
• What is his favorite WordPress version and which one did he start out with?
• What is he looking forward to seeing in WordPress?
• What does the future of WordPress look like to stay relevant? 
• What is his advice for setting up a successful WordPress agency?  

3 Key Points:

1.   Approximately 40% of publishers are using WordPress as a CMS.
2.   CMS flexibility often makes it harder to manage a website day-to-day. 
3. Technology + People + Process is what it takes to run a website.   

Tweetable Quotes:

• “For us, the most important stage of any project is what we refer to as the discovery and definition phase at the very beginning.” – Alex Price
• “A real deep dive into any existing digital platform is understanding how a product is being used currently, maybe elements of user research, auditing analytics. All of the things that we really need before our design team can dive in.” – Alex Price
• “The starting point for us is understanding what tools and processes they (the client) are using elsewhere in other parts of the business.” – Alex Price

Referenced links:

• • 93digital
  • Alex Price