WP Mastery Weekly #7 - Grow your brand to attract customers, Gutenberg 6.5, CI, and more!

This week, the focus is all on podcasts - or so it seems. I came across multiple fantastic episodes on scaling your agency that I've collected for you below. Additionally, I stumbled upon a nice looking Elementor Pro layout, which I'm now using to redesign my website. Feels a little bit like cheating, but I really am in love with it. I've also launched a new guide on 5 benefits Continuous Integration brings to your WP agency, which also is linked below. I use this technique to save 4-8 hours each week - and you can do, too. Enjoy!

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Business & Growth

Launching, niching and growing an agency - Agency Trailblazers — agencytrailblazer.com Learn from Tim, the owner of an 8-person agency, how to build a team slowly, help clients wtih content marketing + SEO and improve your business with every problem that you're facing. Ep. 0036: Designing a Brand that Attracts your IDEAL Client — theadminbar.com Want to grow a brand that attracts your ideal customers, and not the nerve-wrecking ones? This podcast eposide of The Admin Bar got you covered. How to Successfully Build Technology at Your Digital Agency - Smart Agency Masterclass: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies — jasonswenk.com Technology can be a huge leverage for your technology, if you build it properly. Join Jason Swenk and Bhanuka Harischandra on how Bhanuka's agency builds tech while also serving their clients with video marketing, SEO and content.

WordPress News & Tools

5 Reasons for Continuous Integration - WP Mastery — wpmastery.xyz I created a free PDF that explains the five benefits Continuous Integration will bring into your agency. CI saves me 4-8h every week, it's time that you leverage this too (if you aren't already). Automattic’s Series D – Matt Mullenweg — ma.tt Automattic received a $300m Series D funding round from Salesforce, reaching a valuation of $3b - yes, you read that right. Matt Mullenweg explained how this will help his company scale up projects like WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, JetPack, Tumblr and Gutenberg. His article explains the goals in more detail. Gutenberg 6.5 Adds Experimental Block Directory Search to Inserter and New Social Links Block – WordPress Tavern — wptavern.com Want to install a Gutenberg block directly from the editor? Gutenberg 6.5 lets you do exactly that! Pretty damn cool to install new blocks to your website without even leaving the content you're working on!

How-To's & Dev

CSS Grid Changes EVERYTHING - Amazing Presentation - YouTube — www.youtube.com Fantastic presentation by Morten Rand-Hendrikson about CSS Grid and why it can fix web layouts. 30 minutes of your life well spent! Writing Good Unit Tests: A Step By Step Tutorial - DEV Community ????‍????????‍???? — dev.to Unit testing is something that developers (including myself) should take more seriously. It drastically enhances the code quality and running those tests can even be automated in your build process. Highly recommend this article to get an idea of how your tests should be structured. An Introduction To Automated Testing Of WordPress Plugins With PHPUnit — Smashing Magazine — www.smashingmagazine.com Unit testing is a method to ensure that new code doesn't break the existing functionality. Highly recommend you read through this article to increase your code quality, I'm certainly moving to unit testing and maybe even test-driven-development.

Random Articles

Game Theory: The Science of Decision-Making - YouTube Game Theory is an approach to explaining how we make decisions. The deeper you dive into this matter, the more mindboggling it becomes - at least to me :) That's it for this week! I hope you enjoy this handpicked list of articles! If you think that I'm missing certain topics or blogs, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know! Best, Jan https://wpmastery.xyz

P.S. Here are some tools I use daily, they'll benefit your business too.

Continuous Integration (CI). I use CI at WP Mastery to run all sorts of automated tasks in my coding workflow. For example, my code gets deployed to a server automatically whenever I push a new revision to GitHub. Click here to learn about 5 reasons WP developers need CI (imho). Cloudways (hosting). I host all my own and our client sites with them. We have 7 servers and roughly 50 sites on Cloudways and are in love with them since 2014. Their servers make our sites blazingly fast, they give us plenty of flexibility for development workflows (e.g. Github auto-deploy embedded), and the servers run stable. What more could you ask for? VS Code Pro. When writing code, you want to be as efficient as possible! Changing to the free VS Code editor has been a massive improvement in my daily coding. Check out VS Code Pro to learn power-user workflows from WP Core Contributor Ahmad Awais. Page Builder Cloud. Looking to transfer your Elementor layouts from the staging site to the live website easily? Page Builder Cloud is my tool of choice. It works with Elementor, BB, Divi, Fusion Builder, Oxygen and so many more. And it's just $99/year. Even if it saves you just 1h, it pays for itself. WP Buffs White-Label Maintenance. Want to sell WP maintenance plans but don't have a team to handle the actual work? The WP Buffs offer white-label maintenance plans at exceptional quality. Schedule a free call with them now to get to know them and to partner up. I keep referring my friends to them.