Finally shipped the new site. 19 years on WordPress and I still find relaunching my own site harder than client work. If we've worked together — not looking for a puff piece, just honest feedback: g.page/r/CewWYdMRGUuYEBM/rev…

WordPress keeps losing the 'which CMS' debate and keeps winning the install. Shopify, Webflow, and Squarespace are fine tools. None match the plugin ecosystem or two decades of answers already online. What would you switch to if it vanished tomorrow?

Completion rate is the participation ribbon of corporate training. Honestly, I say that affectionately. But the thing your managers actually want to know, after the course closes, is whether anything changed on the floor. That number is harder to get.

Your website is probably the last place a local customer finds you. Google Maps, your Business Profile, maybe a directory or two, that's the real path. A gorgeous site with no local footprint is a billboard in your basement. Does yours have a footprint?

Quiz scores measure quiz-taking, honestly. I've built enough training programs to say that out loud. Completion percentages are still the main success metric in most corporate training. Somebody should fix that.

I have built courses in LearnDash, LifterLMS, and Sensei. The platform choice moves the needle less than anyone in a procurement meeting wants to hear. Spend the saved decision-time on better assessments and a real transfer task.

Semantic SEO in WordPress is mostly a heading problem, honestly. A theme that stamps H2 on everything gives search engines a flat document. They read your page like a table of contents. If yours has twelve chapters all called Chapter One, nothing ranks.

Here's a quick use for AI. Ask it to become your favourite customer (literally, give it that profile), then have it read your latest posts ... you'd be shocked how often the content is written for the writer, not the audience. Don't know how to prime AI? Just ask, I'll help.

A long time ago, in an auditorium far, far away, I gave a talk called Make a Living Giving It Away. That's still the best business advice I have: the more you give to your community, the more it comes back without you ever chasing leads. This week: plugin fixes.

I found out the photo of my face was broken on my own website. For visitors, anyway. On my computer it looked perfect, because my computer was the only place it still existed. No error, no warning. Just me, looking great, all alone. Fastest test? Open your site on your phone.

I bid on estate auctions and resell the finds. V1 of my pricing helper asked an AI what things were worth: instant, confident, invented. Rebuilt on real sold prices, it now tells me what things are potentially worth without me doing the hallucinating. Less magic, more boat money.

One of my scheduled posts got within 90 minutes of publishing with my note-to-self still in it, in capital letters. Same horror as the mail merge that opens Dear [FIRST NAME]. Every automated check waved it through. A plain read caught it in seconds. Nothing skips the read now.

I deleted a small mountain of topic tags from my website. Every tag is another page Google has to make sense of, and mine said the same thing a hundred different ways. A tag with two posts is a labelled jar holding one screw. The label costs more than the screw.

Fun fact: flying in the dark, your body swears you're climbing when you're level. Trust your gut and you pitch down, into the ground. Your website works the same way: leads feel like you're gaining altitude, but trust Search Console even when you don't like what it's saying.

I lost a morning to a publish button in irons. That's sailing talk: pointed dead into the wind, going nowhere, refusing to explain itself. No error. Just quiet refusal. One line of my own code, doing exactly what I told it. Talk about knocking the wind out of your own sails :)

For three weeks my contact form had a flawless spam record. It was also deleting my customers. The trap: a hidden field only a robot would fill in. Browser autofill is, technically, a robot. Real messages vanished. If your spam record looks perfect, send yourself a test message.

WordPress 5.9 shipped full-site editing in January 2022. I am still being asked in mid-2026 whether FSE is 'production ready.' At what point does 'waiting for it to mature' become the actual risk?

Fort Erie is across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo. Literally a bridge crossing away. And I still hear Niagara businesses say the US market is too far to pursue. That one always loses me.

Google Business Profile is free and for local search visibility, it probably matters more than your website. If you haven't touched yours since you set it up, someone searching 'near me' already chose a competitor.

Gutenberg gets mocked as bloated. For actual editorial publishing (contributors, scheduled posts, structured content), it handles more than the classic editor ever did. Critics who hate it mostly haven't shipped a real publication with it. What's your argument against it?

The default LearnDash build I see most often: beautiful module structure, video lessons, a quiz at the end. It'll pass any audit. It probably won't change what someone does at work on Monday.