551 - Happy New Year (Plans for 2025)
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Dustin: [00:00:00] In today's episode, we are going to talk about the future in 2025, right here on your Website Engineer Podcast, episode number 551.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of your website engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today I am back. First time I've been back in many, many months, and I'll explain why and some ideas and some plans for 2025.

So here's what's been happening since the last podcast that was recorded in September of 2024. I started as a Customer Success Manager at WooCommerce. We'll get more into that at some point in the future. WordCamp US happened. That was in September of 2024. I was there in Portland, Oregon, met up with some of my team.

I met a whole bunch of fun people from the WordPress community and it was a really energizing event until the last thing. The very last thing was Matt's Q and A, which turned into this whole debacle with the WP Engine situation, how it was handled all of those types of things, and that kind of [00:01:00] spent the next couple of weeks in a whirlwind with things that were happening to work and different things.

And then I went to Mexico in the first week of October and that was in Tulum, Mexico. The entire WooCommerce division was there. So I got to meet some of my new teammates. I'm now in the WooCommerce Marketing division. That's where customer success lives. And so that was really exciting to meet some of the team and work through some exercises and just do some, some bonding there.

And then promptly after that, I got all this momentum of learning about my new colleagues and whatnot. And then I promptly went on sabbatical. So I started sabbatical or that is a five year, 10 year, 15 year. Every five years at Automattic, you get the opportunity to take three months paid time off.

And so on October 14th, I basically turned off my computer. I said goodbye to everybody. And I was off. I just started this journey of what can I accomplish in the next 13 weeks? And honestly, it has gone by tremendously fast. I've got a very small fraction of what I wanted to get done, but I've accomplished some really, really cool things.

During my time off, I've had [00:02:00] several house projects. The next time that you see me on video, you'll see a new background on behind my computer. I also went through and did a baseboard trim all around the entire basement, did touch up painting. I installed a fireplace, I built a cold plunge. There's lots of things that I did house project wise, put some new lights in the garage.

And so try to get some of those things kind of knocked off before it got real cold out. And then I did some, some work on the computer. Of course, I couldn't just set aside and do computer related work. So I relaunched a functionalmedicinece. com completely with blocks. So I got rid of Storefront.

I got rid of the Sensei plugin, and now I'm using Lifter LMS in hindsight, it probably wasn't the best idea to switch both of them at the same time because there was website bugs along with like, Oh, we didn't have the correct access in Lifter. So there was some, some things that I had to work through, but the good news is looking at the desktop version, the jetpack speed before was a D or E or a D.

I don't quite remember. It was a very, very low. And I'm very ashamed to say that as a website developer and someone who pushes WooCommerce [00:03:00] and talks about WooCommerce and the benefits of e commerce and wordpress all the time and my website was a trashy slow. But anyways, I now went to a high A on desktop.

There's some still some mobile optimization things that I need to do to get that number up a little bit higher, but I am looking forward to doing that and then revamping the rest of my sites in 2025. I know that I had talked about doing them all in 2024. And honestly, the Functional Medicine CE website, it probably took a good solid six weeks, if that, and probably even more.

And it was just a whole bunch of work. My wife's other site, pharmtotable.Life, that one is like 80 percent done. And that one is sitting at the same D or F level of speed using Storefront. Also, I've moved everything from Sensei over into Lifter LMS already, but there's just a lot of custom pages that need to be rebuilt, which I'm working on doing some of those things.

So that one is almost ready, about 80 percent done. Like I said, and the Your Website Engineer. com, I started this one [00:04:00] about a week ago, mainly because I was like, Oh, I need to get this done before the end of the year. And now the end of the year is here and it just isn't quite done yet, but I'm excited. I think the new plan for Your Website Engineer is, and I've said this in the past too, it never really held true because they were always changing, but I'm going to use the latest theme for each one.

So I'm going to work this year on, it's going to be built on 2025. 2026 theme comes out. I'm just gonna roll and go into that. I didn't think it's kind of funny that I did update my project inside OmniFocus. I had a project that was called update YourWebsiteEngineer.com goal for 2025 or 2015. So I'm about 10 years late on that goal on the redesign.

The homepage currently as it sets in on January 1st, 2025 is from me from more than 15 years ago, it seems like that was a very long ago picture. So kind of revamping the whole thing and working on that. So that is kind of what's been happening. I go back to work on January 14th, just less than two weeks from when this podcast comes out.

So [00:05:00] there is a lot to do still in order to get all ready for that, get really back into the swing of things and put together some systems in place to not be overwhelmed with projects and all these things. The coolest part about doing a block level theme is when my client quote unquote client, my wife has a question or she says, can we build this landing page to do this?

Or can we do this with ConvertKit? Like I can do it in a matter of minutes instead of taking days to build a custom page, get the layout just right with blocks. It's really cool. You can do columns. You can group things, you can style the background for certain things. And I'll get more into that as we continue through the year of 2025.

And so I felt like it was a good investment of my time to do it when I had large chunks of time. I essentially, when the kids went to school, I would come down to my computer and I would just work like I was a regular day, usually about a half day on computer stuff, and then about a half day on the home projects and then in the evenings was all dedicated to the 52 Christmas parties that we had.

All of the nine hours of basketball we had each week and all the other activities that the kids had. There was just a lot of things that [00:06:00] were going on. I'm actually a second grade basketball coach and so there was a lot of thinking about like, how are we gonna improve as a team. And what kind of drills do we run?

And like all the three hours of practice that we have. So that was kind of up to speed on what happened in 2024.

The goal here in 2025 is actually to revamp the show just a little bit, because I feel like this has been going on. I got a, an email from my, my good friend, Steve Stewart. And he's like, congratulations on 14 years of launching a podcast.

So it has been 14 years. There's been episodes in all 14 years. It's been a lot more sporadic over the last couple of years. It's mainly because of the erratic kid schedule and all the things that happen as you get busy with kids and whatnot. But my goal is to release more shows than I did last year.

2024 saw a grand total of nine podcasts came out on the channel. So that's not even one per month. So I think I can do better than that, and then I'm going to restructure the shows just a little bit. I'm good. No more like segment. So no, like news every week and plugin into share and you know, before you get into the main topic.

I want to restructure things just a little bit so I don't have to spend as much time like doing the prep work [00:07:00] and making sure like the news was a very heavy piece in that I had to record every single week to make sure the news was updated. I'm going to do kind of like more of a, like a monthly, monthly recap on the news.

Like here's the things that happened. Here's the, we'll still do the, the WordPress releases and talk about the new features and even new stuff that's coming in WooCommerce and things along those lines. But I want to make sure that I'm not putting news in every single episode, just so I can do more batch recording.

I can get multiple shows done at one time. So different types of shows. We'll talk about WordPress news. Like I said, we'll also highlight a service that integrates with WordPress. Like I've done a lot of work over the past two months with a Kit, which was called convert kit.

Now it's called Kit. Done a lot with Zapier, just some of those services that are kind of WordPress adjacent, like maybe CRM type solutions or something that integrates and does this, or like there's a Printful integration so you can sell products and drop ship things like things along those lines.

Think about those types of WordPress adjacent solutions or solutions that you can run with WordPress and run a small business. Think about those things. Those are some of the [00:08:00] ideas in mind with highlighting the integration services. I also want to do a deep dive into plugins to review. So I'm going to do a full recap of Lifter. How Lifter is so much better than sensei some of the things you can do some of the ways that you can set up some automations and things along those lines I've also started using Loco Translate and Imageify and like some of the plugins that just have been kind of flying under my radar.

The free plugins, sometimes they'll be paid. We'll just kind of see as we go forward. And then I'll also want to chat every month with somebody from the WordPress community, whether that be a, a plugin developer or a theme developer, or somebody who, you know, is a small business owner that runs a WordPress shop and builds WordPress sites for people.

Like, I just want to get different voices of the community onto the show, just to kind of hear some inspiration. I know that there's a lot of weirdness going on with the WordPress community and how different people in the community are doing different things these days. And, and in general, like, I think that wordPress is the most powerful it's ever been.

Obviously, like this is, it continues to get better and better each and every year, but it is one of those things that's like, oh man, this is so cool. And I [00:09:00] learned so many things and I want to hear what other people are doing and learning so we can all level up our WordPress again.

I know you might be listening and you're a developer and you're very, let's go in. Let's let's keep those old themes. Let's not do re blocks. Let's still use some sort of other builder or let's even use the, the old classic editor. Like I think in 2025, we need to embrace the change that's here.

Like we're not going to go backwards from the block header. The block header is actually really cool, especially when you use it in list view. And you can click and you can drag things around, and then you can group things into blocks and you can rename the blocks, and then you can make specific settings for those blocks.

And you can make those blocks reusable. You can make, a page templates or, I think they're called or called reusable blocks. And so you can go in and you can say, oh, here's what my lesson should look like. And you type in your block, and then it fills out the whole thing. And then you can change some things.

Tons and tons of tons of cool things that I've been learning with WordPress over the last couple months. So that's kind of an idea of what the show is going to look like. If you have a plugin or service or something adjacent to WordPress, or you want to be on the show or like you want to be highlighted with [00:10:00] different things, like let me know, reach out to Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com.

If you're a business owner, a course creator, or WordPress enthusiast to chat, the 30 minute chat is all it'll take. Go back and forth a little bit. I do have a, an old podcast that was recorded last year that, It just hasn't been released yet with Mark Moran, a friend of the show. And it was a really great interview.

We'll get that out this year and all kinds of things.

Some of the things that we're going to talk about here in January is we are going to be talking about the State of the Word recap that happened in December. It was completely out of the loop for that. We're going to talk about a new attribute feature in WordPress at 6. 7. So how you can get some of your custom meta fields into your page and you can build those into templates, build those into your page templates and your things.

And so they automatically populate. That's super cool. And again, the integrations ConvertKit, Zapier, Google Analytics, different plugin reviews, like Lifter LMS, Local Translate, Imaginify, and so many more, there's so many things that I want to talk about and I already have one, two, three, four, five different topics lined up for the next five weeks after this.

So that's [00:11:00] what I want to share with you this week. I take care and we'll see you more in 2025 and here's to a great 2025. Let's not worry about what's going on completely in the community and all of the hubbub that's going on there. Let's keep our heads down. Let's continue to build WordPress. Let's continue to switch our sites over to block themes and move those terrible page loading speed scores up to something much better and much higher.

And I will do the same. I'll report back as I have more more things to share, especially when it comes to switching themes to block templates in 2025. So that's all I want to share with you today. Take care and we'll talk again soon. Bye bye for more great WordPress information. Head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer.com