Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name’s Dustin Hartzler, and today I’ve a real short episode for you because I am getting all set to leave for Toronto. It is 4:56 in the morning, on Wednesday morning, and I am just getting ready to pack my bag – while my bags are packed, and I’m ready to head to the airport.

I’m heading there for a week. We have a team meetup. The team that on I’m on, at Automatic, is a global team, and we are based all over the world. We have folks coming from Canada, and all over the U.S., and then Brazil, and Venezuela, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun to spend some time just in the presence of the teammates that I will get to work with every single day.

Also, in other news, in updates, and next week, so next Wednesday starts my three month sabbatical from Automatic. At Automatic, every five years you’re eligible to take a three months sabbatical, and mine starts next week. I’m really excited about just taking some time off and unplugging, and working on some projects around the house, and doing a bunch of things. But I’ve kind of, deemed the next three months, and so that’s May, June, and July, the whole time that I’m off, is the summer of learning. And I wanna dive in, and really wanna spend some time learning about things. And that’s where this podcast episode comes in. I wanna talk about what things do you want to learn in the next three months?

And so, each week will be dedicated to different things. I haven’t 100% figured out what all of the things are gonna be covered, but I have some paid plug ins that I’ve got to test, that I’m excited about, to see some of those things that I’ve never tried before. And so, that’s one option. But I want you to let me know, what can I test for you, or what can I try out, or what kind of things can I do a review for. Some ideas that come to mind, are there any particular paid plug ins that you’re like, “Dustin, I wonder if this is worth the money. Does it give the features and the functionality? Like, say for example, Backup Buddy, is that worth the premium, versus BackWPup?”

If you’re interested in something like that, let me know. Or are you interested in some of these different page builders out there. Maybe Divvy, or Beaver Builder, or some of those other ones that are built out there. Or is just the built in block editor in WordPress, is that going to be better?

What about different CMSs. Maybe you’re listening to this, and you’re like, “Hey Dustin, I wanna hear a review on some of the different CMSs that are out there. Maybe, what’s the difference between WordPress, and Wix, and Weebly? Or is Squarespace better or worse? I’d love to be able to dive into some of those things if you’re interested in that.

Maybe different levels of hosting. What’s the difference between speed wise, of a site that looks exactly the same running on a $2.99 per month hosting plan, versus a $100 per month hosting plan? What’s the difference between those? What kind of speed increase are you going to see?

Maybe you want to learn about different code editors. Maybe you’re interested in what’s the best way to learn how to do this, this, and this, with different code editors. I can go in and do some reviews, and figure out what’s going to be one of the better code editors that’s going to give you the most bang for your buck, and a lot of features that are WordPress-centric.

What about different step-by-step work flows, or guidelines, or checklists, or things like that? Is that something you’re interested in? And like, “Oh, I’m ready to launch a site.” What should be the checklist? Or, what’s the step-by-step guide to launch a website so my client knows exactly what’s going on in the process, and I don’t miss anything?

And so, those are some of the things to think about. If you were interested in any of those topics, go to the show notes for episode No. 439, and leave a comment. Or you can use the contact form on the website, or you can send an email directly to Dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com.

And I’ve got stuff for the next couple episodes, so the next couple will be all lined up. They’ll be a little bit different. They probably won’t have a lot of news or plug ins to talk about because the whole episode is going to be about a plug in. So, just wanted to let you know about the plan for upcoming weeks, and starting next week, is when we’ll go into these deep dives, or deep reviews.

So, again, if you have any questions that you want to me to answer in the next couple months, let me know. Dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com, or use the contact form on the website.

Until then, I’m gonna go learn at our team meet up. We’re talking about all of the things that our team does. I’m on a hybrid team, so there are some of us that do commerce support, and there’s some that are WordPress.com support, and we’re talking about all kinds of things. Whether that be we’re learning something about Gutenberg. I’m teaching about productivity. We’re gonna learn about how people get scheduled at Automatic, and how the happiness engineers get work on the schedule. We’re gonna talk about the business one-on-ones look like, Those are a neat segment of what happiness engineers do in talks one-on-one with are most highly paid customers.

And so, I’m going to be learning all this week about things that go on inside of Automatic, and I want to learn all summer long about things that we can do to make our WordPress sites better. So, that’s what I want to share with you this week. I know it’s short. Take the extra five minutes that you would have been listening to a show, think of an idea, and send it over to me Dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com.