Amy Masson:
Welcome to Women in WP, a bimonthly podcast about women who blog, design, develop, and more in the WordPress community.
Angela Bowman:
Hi, welcome to Women in WP. Today’s episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms.
Angela Bowman:
I’m Angela Bowman.
Amy Masson:
And I’m Amy Masson.
Angela Bowman:
Our guest today is D.J. Billings joining us from Los Angeles, California. D.J. helps individuals and small businesses create and maintain their WordPress websites, focusing on helping them feel empowered to take over their sites and manage them without fear.
Angela Bowman:
Welcome, D.J.
D.J. Billings:
Hi, glad to be here.
Angela Bowman:
I’m so glad you’re here.
Angela Bowman:
We’d like to start off each episode asking our guests how they got into WordPress. How did you get started?
D.J. Billings:
Well, going back before WordPress and I was mentioning this to Amy before we got started, I had a GeoCity site in the ’90s. I don’t know if anybody remembers those anymore. I was looking at the Wayback Machine to see what that might have looked like, but that’s how I did websites back then. And then I went to Blogger, I think it was.
D.J. Billings:
And around 2009 or so, I wanted to create a new site for my freelance illustration business, and I was looking around for some way to do it. I wanted to incorporate a blog and have a static section of the website with the portfolio, and I finally found WordPress. It was kind of the lower cost, the lowest cost I could find, but it was very customizable and that’s what I love. So I messed around, I tinkered, I created the site, and I just kind of fell in love with it. I started using it just for my own stuff, and then I started building sites for my wife and friends, and it just kind of snowballed, and every site I’ve built since then has been in WordPress.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah, that’s kind of how… I think it’s been a lot for a lot of us having that background, and it’s so amazing you mentioned GeoCities. I was just listening to a podcast with a 99% invisible podcast where they talked about the lost cities of Geo and that whole… what happened was I think Yahoo! purchased them and then they were going to take them all down. And this huge effort went into preserving the GeoCities because this was such a pivotal moment of internet history, the GeoCities, and you can actually find them now on the Wayback Machine and the Wayback archive and that whole sense of things that we might lose that we would never know that we had lost and was preserved. So I think that’s so cool that you were involved with that.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, exactly, and that’s fascinating to me too because it’s kind of a weird thing because it’s online. It’s the internet, and as soon as something new comes along, people want to move into that and we kind of lose track of what we had before, whereas if you have photographs of something, you can always go back and see that, so I think it’s a great project because I want to see what everything looked like back then. I have a very fuzzy memory.
Angela Bowman:
Well, and just what kind of things people were sharing, and I feel like that’s almost like an anthropological kind of dig into our technological past, so I’ll post a link to that show in our show notes and but-
Amy Masson:
Well, I just want to know how many times people use the blink tag.
Angela Bowman:
Oh, back then. Yeah.
Amy Masson:
In GeoGities. You’re not making things blink. Do you even really mean it?
D.J. Billings:
Right. I remember that.
Amy Masson:
Oh yeah, that’s a running joke in our house. My kids don’t even know what that means because they… not something people use, but I just remember blink. Look at this thing. It’s blinking on the internet.
D.J. Billings:
I forgot about that.
Amy Masson:
On the worldwide web.
Angela Bowman:
So when you’re working on websites, where do you find yourself on the design, marketing, coding kind of spectrum, and what things do you enjoy doing, and what are your challenges?
D.J. Billings:
Well, for the most part, when I’m working with clients, I usually come into it when somebody already has a site that has been built, that they built it or someone else built it for them and they don’t really know what to do, and so it’s a little bit of like WordPress rescue. So I do a lot of maintenance. I do probably 70% maintenance and 30% design, and it’s interesting because one of the biggest challenges that I have with that… it’s funny because it’s a frustration, and it’s also why I’m here.
D.J. Billings:
But people don’t understand that they need to keep their WordPress websites up to date. They kind of feel like it’s a sort of “set it and forget it” kind of a thing, especially if they aren’t bloggers, if they don’t blog, if they don’t regularly do that, they’re not in the site. So they just think, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s just doing what it’s doing.”
D.J. Billings:
I worked with the client recently, and she had very high Google rankings for what she did. It was great. I mean, her SEO was great. She had a good-looking website, and her old web designer who was supposedly helping her maintain it was retiring, so she forwarded her to me and I went to look at it, and I was like, “Okay, great. Yeah, she just needs some updates. This will be simple. It’ll be easy.” Oh, it was horrible. She hadn’t updated anything, no plugins or WordPress for about five or six years, and so things on the surface were working. It looked fine, but in the background, it was a disaster.
D.J. Billings:
So eventually, as I was working with her, the site went down a couple of times, and she panicked because of her Google rankings. And I had to go into her host, into GoDaddy, and it turned out that her website was even hosted on a deprecated server at GoDaddy. So it was like we had to move her to another server. We had to update WordPress. It was a lot of backend work updating the database. It was-
Angela Bowman:
The [crosstalk 00:06:32] version probably couldn’t be updated on that old server.
D.J. Billings:
Exactly.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah, I’ve had that.
D.J. Billings:
Exactly. And she just didn’t understand that those were things that even needed to be done or why.
Amy Masson:
Yeah. I’ve gone into sites like that where somebody… in fact, I specifically asked before I saw, “Has everything been updated?” “Oh yeah, yeah.” They said they’ve been updating and then you log in and the version is so old that I was just in shock at how old WordPress was. I didn’t even recognize it, it was so old, and I’m just like, “I can’t even work on the site.”
D.J. Billings:
Yeah. Yeah. [inaudible 00:07:08] there.
Angela Bowman:
Well, and it’s amazing that it wasn’t hacked. My experience in touching any of those sites that weren’t maintained, you’ll find a lot of PHP backdoors and the WordPress core files all of over the place. Even if it’s not visibly hacked, you’ll have all these random files that have [inaudible 00:07:25] on the server, running in the background for years, and no one knows, but things are just slow, things like that.
Amy Masson:
Are you doing maintenance for clients that… or you didn’t build their websites too or just on your own clients that you’re working on their websites?
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah, especially ones that I didn’t build. I’ve also run into a lot of clients and helped get them through stuff because they had somebody build the site and they hired them from Fiber or somewhere and they built the site and then they disappeared and so they didn’t tell them, “Well, here’s what you have to do. When you have a WordPress site, you have to make sure this stays updated and you have to do this.” They don’t train them. They just say, “Here’s your website. Bye,” and then they get stuck, and they’re like, “How come my website’s broken? How come it doesn’t work?”
Angela Bowman:
That’s such an interesting niche market too, instead of niching in a special market where you’re going to be building the websites, niching in what you called WordPress rescue niche, and that just seems like it would be so prevalent because we’re all told WordPress is easy and that people will hire someone on Fiber and they simply have no idea there’s anything that needs to be done beyond that point.
Angela Bowman:
It’s brave of you.
Amy Masson:
On the whole, WordPress is easy, as I don’t think that’s really fair or accurate anymore. I think it’s easy, but a lot of people don’t, and it depends on what you want to do. If all you want to do is log in and paste in some content, sure, but if you actually want to make it look any different than it looks out of the box, it’s not easy.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m kind of shocked sometimes and surprised that people need me for simple things. I had another client who his website was up. It was good, and he just hadn’t written any blog posts for maybe four years, and he wanted me to, on the phone, just talk him through, “How do I post to the blog?” Simple things like that. And the funny thing is the last time he had done it, it was the classic editor, so none of it even looked familiar to him at all.
D.J. Billings:
So thankfully, I was able to talk him through Gutenberg and get him on board with that, which is another thing is Gutenberg, since they changed that, it seems like it’s easy, but it is a new way of thinking about posting. My wife hates it. She’s like, “No, I’m not doing that.”
Amy Masson:
I struggle with Gutenberg myself. And I struggle with it for clients because I don’t find it as intuitive as I would like it to be and trying to explain it to my clients, even just how to line up a photo next to text, I find to be more complicated than it really needs be.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah. Yeah. All those blocks… I’ve worked in other block editors that were proprietary that were more intuitive than Gutenberg, and it’s the same concept, but they’ve somehow made Gutenberg, and I hate to trash on the “they” of Gutenberg because they’re very good people who are doing their best, but there is this… it’s almost as obscure or obfuscated as it possibly could be from a user standpoint. Where do you even find that plus symbol? The black magic you have to do to get the plus symbol to appear to add a block in between two blocks is… it’s like first, you have to recite this incantation. Then you have to spin around three times, and you have to sprinkle this certain dust, and then, you’ll be able to find the plus symbol to add a new block.
D.J. Billings:
Wait, sorry. I’m writing down the steps.
Angela Bowman:
Yes, write down the steps. We’ll post this on Twitter too.
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Tracy:
And now, back to our show,
Angela Bowman:
You mentioned in your write-up to us that as a non-binary person, you feel the WordPress community has been extremely supportive and you’ve been happy to see women leading various teams and helped you more comfortable. Talk to us about… we hear that a lot from people, and we think it’s so special in our community, and we’d love to hear more.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting. This is related. I’ll get there. I also run a screen-printing business as well, and it’s interesting because in tech and in WordPress, there is kind of a similar vibe as when you have kind of the… I’ll say what a client just said yesterday. She said she was struggling with the male ego, and she was trying to get some t-shirts printed, and she kept calling up different screen printers, and they would laugh at her, or they would just cut her off and cut her short, and they wouldn’t answer her questions.
D.J. Billings:
Well, in our business, we’re very much the opposite. We’re all about questions. And I’ve kind of found that to be a little bit odd because I think as a business owner, your whole job is to make people feel comfortable so they want to work with you. So I don’t get that thing of like, “I know a lot more than you. I’m smarter than you, and I have to show you every five minutes.” It’s like, we’re all kind of learning and figuring things out, and it’s the same thing with WordPress and in the tech community in general, as I’ve kind of felt like when I’ve done interviews for different projects or even jobs, a lot of times, that sort of male energy of like, “Okay, show us what you know” gets almost like a test versus when I’ve had interviews that were led by women. It’s more of like, “Let’s have a chat and talk and see if we fit together, if we can work together, and we can already tell you you know this, so let’s figure that part out.” That just feels a little bit more relaxed.
Angela Bowman:
And then as a non-binary person yourself, how has [inaudible 00:14:39] the WordPress community been? Do you go to WordCamps, meetups, do any presentations or anything like that?
D.J. Billings:
Yeah. I just started doing WordCamps this year and the first one I kind of jumped in full force and just volunteered, and I had no idea what I was doing, which was weird because it was also online. It was the first… it was WordCamp LA, and it was the first virtual one that they had done. So it was a lot of like, “We’re just trying to figure all this out.”
D.J. Billings:
But the team was very supportive. Everybody was supportive in their… a lot of people now are very conscious of pronouns. And so, it felt very cohesive. I felt supported. I felt like there were a lot of people like me there where I hadn’t seen that in the past, so that was really good.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah, my son is transitioning right now and has moved from non-binary to looking at she/her pronouns. And as a mom, that’s like a lot. You spend 18 years calling your kid by one thing and then have to switch your whole mental thing. So now, I’m just all more up on the sensitivity around non-binary, and I love it. In a way, I feel like I wish we all could be non-binary. Let’s just… like you said, this male, female roles, and it’s great for us. I think you may be our first non-binary on the Women in WordPress podcast, and so it’s like, we get to be inclusive of people who can embrace both, and I think that is what’s exciting. Partly exciting for me having you here today is you get to be that person.
D.J. Billings:
Oh, that’s great.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah.
D.J. Billings:
That’s great.
Angela Bowman:
That’s awesome.
Amy Masson:
Love what you said about how you just jumped in with volunteering, not knowing what you were getting yourself into, and I would like to point out to anybody listening that hasn’t been to a WordCamp before or for one day, one day when we all get to come together again in real life, volunteer. If you are nervous about going to a WordCamp and you don’t know people or you’re afraid you’re not going to know anybody, sign up to volunteer because then, you’re going to have to talk to people and you’re going to meet people and you’re going to have a lot more fun. You might miss some of the other stuff like just sitting in a session, but I think it’s really rewarding, and it really is a way to get involved without… presenting can be very overwhelming. I still don’t really like doing it that much, but volunteering is a way to be involved without having to take on that role of being in the spotlight.
D.J. Billings:
Absolutely. Yeah and yeah. And you do, especially with the ones that are online, you get to meet people and have a different experience than you would have if you’d just kind of sat there and watched stuff on Zoom, watched the presentations and then you go away. It’s just completely different, a lot more rewarding.
Angela Bowman:
I felt that way. I haven’t really been into the online WordCamps, but I was kind of volunteered. I don’t know that I really volunteered, but I was volunteered to be a moderator for a couple of sessions for our local meet, our local WordCamp last year. And I got so much out of it, and I even then it kind of got me into wanting to listen to other sessions because once you’re in and you’re in the know, you do feel more engaged with the whole process, and I had an incredible time.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah.
Amy Masson:
I volunteered at WordCamp US, I think at… was it the last one or the one before that, and I got a lot out of it, and I met some new people, and you get to go to the special events, so I would definitely say do it if you would like to get to know more people in WordPress and you don’t know where to get started. Even now with it being online, it would be good to at least meet some people because having those connections in the community is really what changed the course of my career, I mean, completely.
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. I could see that.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah because you meet people that you would find out about opportunities that you would never otherwise know about.
Amy Masson:
Well, just having those connections to just… even just share, “Hey, I’m struggling with this. What do you do” and about not just WordPress, but about business and clients and having that sounding board with somebody that’s actually doing the same thing as you is so much… there’s so much value in that, and I went so long without it.
Angela Bowman:
Yeah and the WordPress community, I think, is also supportive of just people’s lives, just your personal lives. I put something out there about my mom’s GoFundMe for her cancer treatment. There were people in the WordPress community donating to her GoFundMe that I didn’t even really know-know. Maybe we’d had a tech support chat or something or some little connection, but this community is pretty phenomenal. We miss the WordCamps because we can’t hug each other now.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, for sure.
Amy Masson:
I just happened to notice in your bio that your work has been seen on Blues Clues, and Steve just had this thing where he came out and apologized for abruptly leaving and as a parent of a child that grew up on Blues Clues, so I grew up on blues clues, tell me what you did on Blues Clues.
D.J. Billings:
Well, I started end of second season as a storyboard artist kind of out of nowhere because I didn’t really have any experience. So I moved my whole family from Phoenix, Arizona to New York City to work on the show. So it was like lots of different things happening at the same in time, but yeah, it was really fun. I started as a storyboard artist. I started dabbling in doing some animation, which is what I really wanted to do, and it was such a great team there, just a very, very… like a family, really. And so the animation director would say, “Oh, you want to animate? Okay, well here’s a couple little things that you can do and we will put into the show,” and they wanted to help people in their careers. And it was just really rewarding to work with everybody.
D.J. Billings:
And a little bit of trivia. This was as far as the third season of the show. Everybody who worked on the show, except for one of the creators, was under 30 years old.
Amy Masson:
Wow.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah. And only one member of the whole crew had children and that was me.
Amy Masson:
Well, and one of the things they’ve studied is children’s shows and gender equality, and Blues Clues was one of the only shows that was really equal. And that, to me, even in the time we’re in, it’s like, “Shouldn’t there be more representation in children’s cartoons,” and Blues Clues really hit the nail on the head with it. And I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it was great.
D.J. Billings:
It absolutely was. It was very much a women-led team. All the producers, again, except for Todd, one of the creators, they were all women, and a lot of the directors were women. It was a very women-led and women-directed show that I think that comes out.
Amy Masson:
Well, I cried like a baby when Steve did his little… I sent it to my son. I’m like, “Look” because his third birthday was all Blues Clues, and he was just kind of like, “eh” because he is a teenager, but I’m crying watching Steve talk about how he misses us.
Angela Bowman:
Aw.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah.
Amy Masson:
It was very moving. So did you meet Steve?
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I worked with him all the time.
Amy Masson:
Were you there for Joe too or just Steve?
D.J. Billings:
Yes, I was. I was there for the big transition from Steve to Joe.
Amy Masson:
Steve went to college? Yeah.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah. And actually, my daughter has the distinction of being Joe’s official first fan. She was just maybe three at the time, I think? And my wife would bring the kids up to the studio, and they would kind of run around the studio and run into people and stuff all over the place. So yeah, it was just like… Steve and Joe were just kind of like people.
Amy Masson:
I’m just fan-girling right now over the fact that you got to work on Blues Clues. I know which it’s not WordPress, but I think it’s related in our women and WordPress [crosstalk 00:23:20].
D.J. Billings:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Angela Bowman:
Well, that’s the bonus of being in Los Angeles, don’t you think, is you get those kind of opportunities.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It’s funny. When I worked on the show, it was in New York City, and it’s funny because I moved. I left the show, moved to Los Angeles, and everybody in the show is like, “Wow, I wish I could just pick up, move to Los Angeles,” and I’m like, “Well, come on.” And now, a lot of people that I used to work with now live here too, so it’s kind of cool.
Amy Masson:
Do you have a Blues Clues expat community?
D.J. Billings:
A little bit. Yeah.
Amy Masson:
Oh, I still want to join that.
Angela Bowman:
We want to come have coffee with you all.
Amy Masson:
Yes.
Angela Bowman:
You mentioned that you’ve been working on increasing your PHP and JavaScript skills and also recently discovering WP-CLI, and how’s all that going for you?Lifelong process.
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. You’re never done learning, right? There’s a lot. PHP is a little bit challenging. I’m at the point now where I can understand it, and I can write a little bit, so if I dive into a template file that it’s not a complete mystery. It’s not just gobbledy-gook. I’ve done a little bit of adjusting of files, template files for WooCommerce for people’s sites to make something work. So I’m getting a little bit more comfortable there.
D.J. Billings:
Getting into JavaScript, my mind was blown when I found out about WP-CLI. I was like, “Whoa,” and so now, I maintain maybe 20-something sites, and so, instead of going into each site and doing it, I just SSH, and I’m on the server and just updating plugins. And it’s so much faster for me, and I don’t have to wait for the site to load. It was like, mind blown.
Angela Bowman:
It’s pretty amazing what you can do with that if you… especially I come from [inaudible 00:25:26], so it’s like, “Yeah, yeah. Just give me a command line.”
D.J. Billings:
Yep.
Angela Bowman:
And it’s not that hard. There’s some pretty simple stuff in there. It’s pretty well documented.
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s great. Anybody who does anything in WordPress, I recommend trying it out at least. Don’t be scared of bash or the terminal. Just try some things out, see how it goes. It is, like Angela said, there is a lot of documentation out there.
Amy Masson:
And what are you thinking about? I know you’re wanting to start developing plugins. Do you have any in mind that you’re working on?
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, actually I have one that I was thinking about doing, and I think it was done before, but it’s deprecated now and nobody is supporting it. But I wanted to do a developer designer notes plugin, to have a separate part of a WordPress website where… because I work on a lot of different sites where somebody else created it and it would be nice if there were notes in there. I was updating somebody’s site, and she’s pretty good about taking it over and updating plugins and making posts and stuff, but there were a few things in the customizer that I did that really needed more than just one line of comment to describe what it was doing.
D.J. Billings:
So I thought if there was a place in the site where I could just put all these notes in and it would just live in the site instead of sending her a Google Doc, that would be great because anybody who else who came along later would go, “Oh, okay. I see what they did. I get it. All right” because a lot of times, I’ll walk into a website and it’ll be like, “What the hell did they do in here? I don’t even know where to look for this stuff” and having notes would be just fantastic.
Amy Masson:
Well, I think that’d be useful even for myself because sometimes, I’ll log into a site and be like, “What the hell did I do on this?”
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, yep. That too.
Angela Bowman:
Well and you solve some brilliant problem and you come to another site where you have to solve the same problem and you’re like, “This looks familiar. I think I’ve solved this problem before. When did I solve that?”
Angela Bowman:
What I’ve been doing is sticking those in gists or in my GitHub, but having those site-specific notes… even with a client, I’ll make some change because the clients requested a WooCommerce change, and I’ll write some function or something to do some crazy thing that they wanted and then a year later I’m like, “Why were we doing that? What problem we were trying to solve?” And that would be perfect. And it does seem like too much to have in a comments field.
Angela Bowman:
I’ve been using the code snippets plugin, though. So code snippets would be like… you can do PHP and HTML and JavaScript, but the code snippets, what’s kind of cool about that is that there is a comment section, so for each code snippet that you write, you could have kind of a little ongoing dialogue with yourself about, “I had turned this off because it was broken” or “fix this line,” so you could kind of do it there, but it’s not quite the same as what you’re talking about, which is online documentation for the site.
Angela Bowman:
So when you create this plugin, it would be great if you could have a taxonomy for these notes where you would have something for end-user documentation and then also something for the developer’s notes. So something that the user could use and the developer could use. We will-
D.J. Billings:
Absolutely.
Angela Bowman:
… we will support you in this plugin.
D.J. Billings:
I appreciate that. It might be a while.
Amy Masson:
There is a plugin called WPHelp that you can put in that you could… I use it to give my clients instructions, a little… “Here is some information that’s specific to your site that you should know,” but you could use it as adding your own notes for yourself as well, probably.
D.J. Billings:
Oh, that’s cool. It’s called WPHelp?
Amy Masson:
WPHelp and I even embed videos, so if I make a custom video for my clients, I’ll kind of make a little video library. If they have a really custom site and they need instructions on how to maintain it, I’ll use that.
Angela Bowman:
We’re all on our keyboards Googling.
D.J. Billings:
I know. I was just looking it up.
Angela Bowman:
WPHelp plugin.
Amy Masson:
It’s going to be in the show notes, so people can go look at it there.
D.J. Billings:
Awesome.
Amy Masson:
But yeah, it’s just something I’ll throw in. I actually forgot about it for a while and just remembered it recently, and I’m like, “Oh, I got to use that again.”
Angela Bowman:
Oh, it’s by Mark Jaquith but it’s also… I don’t know that it’s needed to be updated, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time, and it may not have to be, but he had a roadmap, but it seems like he hasn’t… it might be great to reach out to Mark and ask.
Amy Masson:
Maybe you can take it over, D.J.
D.J. Billings:
Yes. Hey.
Angela Bowman:
He’s a pretty cool guy.
Angela Bowman:
Working with WooCommerce, you do have to start to get into that PHP, and what I found is I was kind of working more with the WooCommerce hooks than with the templates. Sometimes, I’d have to change a template file. At first, I started with changing templates and then I realized, “Oh, I can really get rid of all these custom templates and do it all with the WooCommerce hooks,” but learning how to modify WooCommerce templates and work with their hook system kind of levels you up on your PHP because in a way, what we’re learning with WordPress PHP is really the WordPress way of doing PHP. It’s not like you have to learn all PHP. It’s you have to learn how WordPress does be PHP and its PHP, and one book that is super helpful is Professional WordPress by Brad Williams.
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. I have that.
Angela Bowman:
That leveled me up. You have that? Yeah. It was like it was a little Bible for me, and it helped me to just get my mind around WP query, and back before we had fancy themes that you could do you all your little post widgets with, it’s like, you actually had to write your own queries to get a group of posts on some page on the site or something and then learning multiple loops. It’s like, “Oh, and then you’ve got a reset” and all these… it helped me a lot, but its ongoing stack overflows, definitely a huge crutch.
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah, for sure. Brad’s book is great. I’m actually looking at it on my shelf right now. That helped me a lot. And then, like you said, Stack Overflow and Google’s your friend.
D.J. Billings:
I think people get the idea sometimes that if you’re an expert in WordPress that you just kind of know everything and you’re done, and the secret is is that nobody really knows everything, and people are Googling stuff all the time.
Amy Masson:
That is so valuable for people to hear. I really think so because I think I… you hear people that have imposter syndrome and they just don’t think that they’re able to… that they’re not a real developer or they’re not this or that because they don’t know everything. Nobody, none of us know everything. I Google shit all the time. That’s going to be the main thing in my next resume is I’m good at Googling shit.
Angela Bowman:
That’s going to be the only thing on my next resume. What else?
Amy Masson:
Yeah, I’m just going to put, “Amy Masson. I can Google.”
D.J. Billings:
That’s great. That’s going to go on my LinkedIn now, for sure.
Angela Bowman:
Skills.
D.J. Billings:
Skills.
Amy Masson:
Yeah, I mean, as long as you have a willingness to learn and the ability to try and find these resources, I don’t think that there’s any reason to expect that every person shouldn’t have all the answers, day one. And if people come to me and ask me for something on their site and I don’t know how to do it, I always say, “Hey, I’ve not done that before, but I’ll look into it and get back to you.” I don’t tell them I know how or tell them I don’t know. I tell them I don’t know how, but I don’t pretend I have the answers just so I can seem like I have all the answers.
D.J. Billings:
Right. Yeah. And I think people respect that too. And the funny thing is if somebody’s working on their own WordPress site and they get stuck, if you Google what your problem is, chances are you’re going to find a whole page full of other people who have that exact same problem. You’re going to have to pick and choose between which rabbit hole do you go down first?
D.J. Billings:
But everybody, if you have a problem, everybody else, well, not everybody else, but a lot of other people are going to have had that problem. And once you see that, you’re like, “Oh, I get it. I get it. Everybody doesn’t know everything. Okay.”
Amy Masson:
Everybody doesn’t know everything. That’s the title of my next book.
D.J. Billings:
And that’s going on my LinkedIn.
Amy Masson:
Well, it’s been awesome having you on today. Before we go, can you tell everyone where they can find you online?
D.J. Billings:
Oh yeah. My WordPress website is wp-dj.com and then I’m all over Twitter. It’s just DJ on Twitter. So I’m there just about every day.
Amy Masson:
Awesome.
Amy Masson:
Well, thanks for being on.
D.J. Billings:
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
Tracy:
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Tracy:
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Tracy:
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This episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms
