In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about some goals that you can set for yourself in 2016 right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 265. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin, and today we will be talking about goals and the goals that we can set for our new year in 2016. But first, we’ll go through the announcement section and “Is there a plugin for that?” Unfortunately, there is not a lot of news happening as we’re recording this last week in 2015. It is hard to believe that another year has gone by so very quickly. So many things have happened in 2015; I’m excited to see what 2016 holds for just the future of WordPress and where things are going to go and the new plugins, the new ideas that people are going to come up with for 2016. So, no announcements this week. I look forward to sharing some announcements happening in 2016 on next week’s show.

There is a plugin for that, though, that I want to talk about, and this one is called "Most and Least Read Post Widgets." And I know that there’s a lot of plugins out there that display the most read post, and so, that helps your most read post get more traction and more people reading them, and more eyes and more visitors. But, this one’s kind of interesting that you can actually show your least read post widget as well. And, you may not want to display those right on your homepage or on every sidebar, but I can see this being useful in getting some more traction to some of those posts that you maybe published a few years ago, and you think it’s still relevant content. You could definitely use a plugin for this. You’ve got some options within this plugin. You can show the number of posts, you can say, “I want to show ten of the most recent, or the most read or the least read posts.” You can exclude posts that have titles that contain a certain word. So, maybe if you have the word “2014,” maybe you want to exclude that because that’s maybe a little older of a post, and you can also exclude posts that are older than “X” amount of days. So, if you only wanted to show your last years’ worth of content in the least read posts within the last year, you can do that as well. So, this is a pretty neat plugin. It’s got over 4,000 downloads. It is compatible with 2.9 and higher, so that means it’s been around for a little while. But, I just saw this one, I thought it would be kind of interesting to highlight. And so, it is called “Most and Least Read Posts Widget.” And you can find a direct link to it in the show notes for episode number 265.

So, today let’s dive in and talk just a little bit about goals and the goals that you may want to set for yourself in 2016. I know that I’m a big setter of goals. I love to just kind of map out what the year looks like. And I know that in 2015, I had some really lofty goals, wasn’t able to complete all of them, but the ones I did complete were pretty big-size goals. So, that’s really exciting to me. So, what I just wanted to talk about some of the things that you may want to think about when setting those goals for 2016 of how we can improve ourselves with WordPress. There are a lot of goals that kind of center around WordPress themselves, and so, this is just kind of to stir your imagination, help you to figure out, “Oh, this is what I really want to focus on.” And I think what I’m going to do personally for 2016 is there’s a bunch of new skills that I want to learn, like I want to become better with using the terminal, and I want to become better at using Git via the terminal. And WP-CLI is another technology that I’d love to master. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to head down and focus on one specific area of technology whether that be learning the command line, or learning JavaScript or whatever that is, I’m going to focus intently for one month and do as much as I can for one month. That way, I’m very, very much repeated in whatever that task is, and then hopefully, that’s going to be something that sticks as 2016 continues.

I know that in the past, I’ve tried, “Oh, well I’ll work on JavaScript for 15 minutes this week, and then next week I’ll do some PHP, and then next week I’ll do this.” And then I’ve already forgotten what I’ve done two weeks ago. And so, that’s going to be kind of how I structure my goals in 2016. But some of the goals that you may think of, one of them is, become better at WordPress. And what I mean by that is, maybe you become more familiar with the dashboard, maybe you become more efficient at getting a post drafted from draft to completion and published state. Maybe you learn how to add extra functionality without adding a plugin. I put this in the “better at WordPress” category because if you add custom post types – that’s something that came up to mind real quick for me – but custom post types is, yes, you have to add some code, but you don’t actually have to program anything. You’re basically copying and pasting code, and that adds the functionality. And then, you can use that functionality to build that into your theme, or to put it in a plugin or whatever. So, that’s something that you could familiarize yourself with and get better at using WordPress as a whole.

Another thing that you could master is using the FTP client. And this isn’t a hard skill at all, but FTP is a way that you can see your files directly on the server, you can copy and paste things, you can move things around, and it’s basically like your Finder window on your Mac or your Windows Explorer on your Windows computer. It’s basically the same thing, but you’re looking at a server somewhere out there in the world where all your files are located. So, that’s something that you could work on in 2016 – just, “Okay, how do I install FTP client? How do I get the right credentials for my hosting account? How do I manipulate files? How do I add a plugin directly via FTP instead of the WordPress uploader?” All of those different things you could learn and kind of explore, and that will just make you more familiar with how WordPress works in 2016.

Another thing that you may want to focus on in 2016 is working on improving your programming skills. Maybe you want to learn HTML and CSS and just be better at figuring out how to add content to your website without getting frustrated with, “How do I change this to be a different color or a different size, or how do I make different columns and all of that good jazz?” Maybe you want to learn PHP because you want to develop themes, and you want to be able to pull different information out of a database and display that right there on your website. Maybe that’s another thing that you want to learn in 2016. Maybe you want to take Matt’s homework from his State of the Word that we talked about a few weeks ago, and learn JavaScript and learn it well so we know these new technologies that are coming out, that we can implement those and we can use those on our websites. This is the big piece of the puzzle for me. There’s a lot of programming that I want to learn, and with the roles that I’m having automatic now within the Woo department and learning more about WooCommerce, I’m just going to be knee-deep in code all year round. I’m really excited about it, and that’s one of the main reasons that I am staying with Woo for a while and making that my permanent team.

Let’s see what else we could work on in 2016. We could work on capturing more of the leads to our websites. Maybe that’s something that you really want to focus on in 2016, like get more people to come to your website, get more people to sign up for your email list, so you can send out more emails, so you can make more sales – Those are things that we can work on in a specific year, or a three-month period of the year. You could take some of these that we’re talking about today and we could say, “Okay, we’re going to work on getting more lead capture for the first three months. We’re going to focus really intently on that for three months, and then we’ll move to something else in the next three month of the year – whatever that looks like.

So, you could add an additional plugin to your WordPress site so they may be LeadPages or OptinMonster, that gives you a lot more flexibility and the ability to really create those custom opt-in boxes. You could create new opt-in incentives. Maybe your ebook is a little stale; it’s been out there for a while. You could go ahead and you could start using that. That would be, creating new ones; see which ones work better. What are people really asking for? You could create opt-ins for multiple pieces of content. I know that at LeadPages, they talk about this all the time. Every post and every piece of content that you publish for free should have an additional download that people can get on your email list. You can test out different variations of your forms. Does a pop-up work better than a slide-up from the bottom? Does that work better than a banner that comes down from the top? Does it work better than when somebody exits? How does the pop-up come out? You can test all of those different things. You could also test – with some of these plugins – different variations of the same form. So, maybe you want to try an opt-in button that says, “Get Freebie Now,” or maybe you try it, it says, “Get Download Now,” or maybe it says, “Get Ebook Now.” And, you can change the color and you can vary these to see which ones have a better click-through rate.

All of these things, you know, you can work on and tweak and play; and this is something, too, that I’m going to focus on – I’m going to spend some of the year in 2016 focusing on, especially the testing of different forms, and creating new opt-ins. I know that the opt-in that I’ve had for the longest time, “The 50 Most Useful Plugins,” now there’s over 10,000 more plugins in the repository since I wrote that ebook. So, I’m sure there are a few of them that are a just a little bit out of date.

Another thing that you could focus on in 2016 is a new website design, and there’s a lots of different ways that you could do this. You could create your own theme if you wanted to. You could just go out there and you have this idea in your head, you could design it in Photoshop, you could use your new technologies that you learned in the programming section. Maybe you’ve learned some new coding skills and you want to take that Photoshop design, turn it into an HTML theme, and then turn it into a WordPress site. You could absolutely do that. Maybe you want to find a theme out there on the repository or maybe in one of the theme shops somewhere and then customize it to make it exactly what you need it to do for your website. Maybe you’ve got different page templates for your webinar replays – all of these different things that you could do. There’s a lot of really cool things that you could do with a new website design. You don’t have to design it completely from scratch. Or, you can even customize your current theme. Maybe there’s a few pages that are outdated. Maybe you need to add a template file so that you can have a full page-width site. Or, maybe you’re offering a course and your course has different color schemes. Or, maybe, you want to have a landing page for the course that looks different than the rest of the pages on your website, but you want to control it through WordPress, and you want to be able to do that. You can do all of those things within the year.

A new website design is an all-encompassing, huge, big project if you want. You could just change the theme, do a few little tweaks, and you could be done. There’s a lot of different things that can fall under this bucket. Maybe it is developing some short codes for pieces of content that you use regularly. Or, maybe instead of developing some short code, maybe you just build some things into the theme so they appear, every time, exactly like you want it. Instead of maybe at the bottom of every post you do a little summary about your bio, instead of doing that, maybe you hard-code that right into your theme, and so then, that displays on every single page. There’s tons and tons of things that you could do to work on and fix with your website, and you just have to take a little bit of time, figure out what your goals are and what you want to do and then write it down and really start working on them.

And the last piece of the puzzle that I thought we could work on 2016 – and there’s tons of other things, but these are just a few that I wanted to highlight today – is, contributing to Core – building into the community. That’s the big thing. We could spend time getting to know people and just engaging with the WordPress community. We could also find outstanding tickets in WordPress Core and work on fixing those. Again, you’ll have to have some programming language to be able to do that, to learn to look at the code, figure out what the problem is, what the correct solution is and then actually pull in the code, make the fixes, and put a pull request out there to have other developers look at your code. That would be absolutely outstanding if we could get more people to do that. I know that’s always one of my goals to help and fix as many bugs as possible. Another thing that you could do to build into that community is you can build and release a theme or a plugin on the WordPress repository. Maybe, one of your themes, your starter frameworks that you use, you could put that out there on the repository so hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people could start using it, and then you could start doing support for that. Maybe, you could turn one of your free WordPress repository themes into a premium theme that you could start getting paid for regularly.

The same thing with plugins. You could have a plugin that fixes one specific thing for you that maybe would be good for other people, and then you could continue to build that out, give that away for free. And then once you’ve got a lot of people that are interested, you could build in more features and you could turn that into a premium product and start selling that as well. That’s something else that you could do. Another thing I would highly recommend in 2016, is everyone get involved in the WordPress community in your community – and not every community from everyone that’s listening to the show has that opportunity, but if you go out to Meetup.com you can search for WordPress and you can find the closest WordPress meetup. And then, if you go to WordCamp.org and you can go to the schedule section, and there’s not a lot there right now because we’re getting really close to the beginning of the year, but you can find WordCamps that were within a few hours’ drive.

I know in the Midwest, especially where I live, there’s about seven WordCamps that I can get to within a five hour drive of my house – which, I can’t go to all of them. If I could, that would be awesome. But, just building the community, meeting other WordPress people – people that you can bounce ideas off of, maybe that you can join business ventures with – Maybe you’re not a programmer, but you can find somebody at a WordCamp that can do all your programming for you, that would be awesome and amazing as well. So, attending a WordCamp or some sort of WordPress event is really, really exciting. You learn a lot and it’s something that should be on everybody’s goal list for 2016.

And then, another thing I thought about with going back to contributing to core, you can actually go out and update documentation for the WordPress codecs. And I know this is kind of a thankless job; there’s not a lot of glitz and glamor with updating documentation, but it is so needed. Every piece of content, every function, there’s so many moving pieces of WordPress and they all need to be documented so people know what each of them are about and how the functions work, and how all of these different things that are built into WordPress, how they actually work and how they function. So, that’s something else that you can work on. You could also just look through WordPress and see if you can find any typos. Look at your dashboard. Is there anything that’s misspelled, or does it not work in the language translation? Another thing you can do is update languages. There are so many languages that are lacking in WordPress that definitely need people to help to translate them. So, if you are fluent in more languages than just English, you can definitely help out with a translating project and helping to get not just WordPress Core itself, but WordPress and all of the plugins – help to get those more translated in 2016.

I know that there’s special strings that each plugin will use, and somehow within the translating system, you just have to translate that string once and then it gets translated throughout all of the plugins and all of the themes which is really, really cool. So, there are tons of things. We could spend hours, upon hours, upon hours of just dreaming up ideas and things that we want to do with WordPress. But, I highly recommend towards the end of this year, at the beginning of 2016, spend a little bit of time, write down some of these goals. Just spend a little bit of time just thinking about, “Okay, what is realistic, what’s maybe a little bit above realistic.” Maybe you want to learn one of those goals that’s just a little bit outside your reaches – really understanding JavaScript and being able to write a program in JavaScript that uses the WordPress API, or something very complex. Make that a goal and then take small little steps each day and each week to get a little bit closer to each one of those things. That’s definitely what I would recommend, and that’s what I want to try to do in 2016. Just take small, incremental steps. Be very – repetitive is not the right word, and redundant is not the right word. I can’t think of it. But, just spend time every day, or a few chunks of time every week.

I find it best to put a little bit of time on my calendar. I know that on Friday afternoons, I have a block of time that’s “Contribute to Core.” That’s just what I call it. And then, I spend a little bit of time. “Okay, do I work on my own plugin, then? Do I work on finding bugs? Do I do some Beta testing of the new version of Core?” All of those different things. Find a little time, put it on your calendar, and just be very regimented about using it regularly, or doing whatever that task is. Do it regularly so that you spend some time really learning that. Or, if you’re learning a new skill, or if you’re programming, you have to spend some time; otherwise, you’ll forget what you’re doing. And that’s absolutely what I recommend for 2016.

So, that is going to be the last show of 2015. Let’s get out of here and just say thank you so much for an amazing 2015. I had so much fun doing the free webinars. We had so much fun doing all of the other projects that I worked on this year that I couldn’t have done it without you. If you guys weren’t there, they weren’t listening. Who cares if I create any of this content? This year, 2016 is going to be amazing. Lots more videos coming this year, and, again, 52 more podcast episodes. So, if you ever have any topics, please let me know, and we’ll talk to you again in the next year. Take care. Bye-bye.