WordPress has grown and matured in the past 10 years as a content management system and web app platform, and the needs of clients and enterprises using WordPress have grown as well. To answer that call, WordPress agencies and consultancies will need to adapt by strengthening their teams, bettering their WP coding practices, and becoming more active in the community, too. Learn what enterprises want from their WordPress partners from what we've learned on the WordPress.com VIP team, and some tips to help small, medium, and large agencies ready for the next 10 years of WordPress projects and challenges. Presentation originally presented at WordCamp Paris, January 2014.

1. W O R D P R E S S AG E N C I E S :
FAC I N G C H A L L E N G E S F O R T H E
NEXT 10 YEARS
SARA @ROSSO, AUTOMATTIC
W O R D C A M P PA R I S 2 0 1 4

2. 10
YEARS OF
WORDPRESS

3. 21.2%
of the top 10 million websites

6. WORDPRESS:
THE ENTERPRISE ERA

7. 16% and growing
!
Large Business or Enterprise Clients
2013 WordPress survey

8. “I want to see more large WordPress
consultancies in the future.”

9. W H AT E N T E R P R I S E S WA N T

10. “Enterprises love enterprises.”
– JAKE GOLDMAN, 10UP

11. THINK LIKE AN
ENTERPRISE AT ANY SIZE

12. ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
• Pricing
• Breadth of services
• Robustness of team
• Ongoing support
• Risk tolerance

13. GROW

14. “How do you plan for the future
while you hunt for your next
meal?”
– NICK GERNERT
A U T O M AT T I C , F O R M E R LY V O C E
C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

15. GROWING
• Always be interviewing
• Try before you hire
• Distributed == Find talent anywhere
• Network inside the WP community

16. “To build the kind of sites we
wanted, for the kind of
clients we wanted, we needed to
put together a team of
specialists.”
– SIMON DICKSON, CODE FOR THE PEOPLE

17. “Keep a client. Make a
partnership.”
– PA U L M A I O R A N A
V P M E D I A S E R V I C E S , A U T O M AT T I C

18. PARTNER FOR SUCCESS

19. PARTNER
• Other WordPress firms
• Subcontract for overflow or special services
• Larger, non-WordPress specialist firms
• Beyond code

20. ACQUIRE

21. ACQUIRE
• Engineering talent
• Products and plugins
• Client base

22. KNOW

23. “[WordPress agencies] often have
the talent, but aren't pulling
together the non-development
skills that make clients
comfortable spending the big
bucks.”
– M AT T M U L L E N W E G

24. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
• Managing Expectations
• Proactive Communication & Planning
• Timelines & Dependencies
• Resource Management
• Contingency Plans

25. MAKE YOUR CODE BETTER

26. “Code reviews serve two purposes:
to improve your code’s quality,
and to learn from each other.”
– MO JANGDA, WORDPRESS.COM VIP

27. DEVELOPER PLUGIN

28. VIP CODE SCANNER

29. “Every line of code we ship has at
least one extra set of eyes on it. It's
not supervisory, it's peer review,
which fosters collaboration.”
–AUSTIN SMITH, ALLEY INTERACTIVE

30. CODE REVIEW APPROACHES
• Gatekeeper
• Peer review
• Review by committee
• Pair coding

31. LEARN WORDPRESS
Flickr: Bohman

32. LEARN
• Codex
• .org Handbooks
• WordPress.tv

33. SHOW

34. TELL YOUR CODE’S STORY

35. TELLING YOUR CODE’S STORY
• Development approach & coding decisions
• Server or architecture setup & modifications
• Modifications of or forking .org plugins
• Development workflows

36. TELL YOUR CLIENT’S STORIES

37. TELLING
THE
CLIENT’S STORY
• Editorial and administrator tools
• Publishing workflows
• Business use cases
• Budgets and cost savings
• Results

39. “More WordPress agencies need
to wake up to the power of being
part of the WP community.”
– T O M W I L L M O T, H U M A N M A D E

40. BE IN THE COMMUNITY
Flickr: Heisenbergmedia

41. BE IN THE COMMUNITY
• WordCamps, Meetups, Hack Days
• Present, Sponsor, Participate, Host
• Release Code & Plugins to .org
• Beta test new releases

42. CONTRIBUTE TO CORE

43. CONTRIBUTE
TO
CORE
• Make WordPress
• Core, UI, Mobile, Accessibility
• .org-dedicated Resources
• Documentation and Translation
• Support

44. KNOW
SHOW
GROW

45. THANKS!
(We’re hiring!)
@Automattic automattic.com/jobs
@WordPressVIP vip.wordpress.com
Sara @Rosso
sararosso.com
VIP Global Services Manager
Automattic / WordPress.com