2224 - Navigating the Evolving Landscape of WordPress with Ndevr's Meeky Hwang

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1:05With us right now, it's Miki Wang. Miki, you are the CEO and co-founder of Endeavor, and it's spelled N-D-E-V-E-R.io. That's the website, Endeavor.io. Miki, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me, Josh. A fellow Orlandian, I might add, just down the road from me, but very grateful to get connected. before we start talking about the work that you do with Endeavor. What are you doing lately, Mickey, for fun? What are you geeking out on? What are you into lately? It's interesting because if you ask me the same question five years ago, it's going to be completely different. But I moved here about three years ago.

1:50And then with that, this is a whole Disney area. And there's a whole new things coming up with the Universal Studio. I'm geeked doubt I'm following what's going on and what's going to happen with all these parks and and Disney and all that so a fellow theme park nerd I love it so yeah so just for those who don't know there is a brand new theme park as of when we're recording this we actually have our early preview as pass holders I think it's in three weeks so we're really excited my son's already been I think twice because his girlfriend works at Universal Studios. And just everything I've seen, it's just so remarkable.

2:35But was that, did you intentionally move to Orlando based on kind of like the location? Well, not necessarily. Well, kind of, because we got an Airbnb. So we got into that. So when we're putting that together, my husband's actually very into putting decorations and for the theming and everything. He wanted to work at one of those places as like Imagineer. So when he was doing that, we just decided like, why don't we just move? So like that's what happened. That's so funny. We're always the theme park fanatics. We came down here for spring break and then my last company started taking off. So we're like, I guess we can buy a house and where should we live?

3:13And so we just thought, well, we can live anywhere. So why don't we live someplace fun? And Orlando seems to offer quite a bit, especially if you've got young kids, which we did at the time. So it's been a great place to raise a family. But Miki, let's go ahead and talk about Endeavor and tell me about the work that you do. So we are a WordPress development company. So we do development, maintenance, migration, and all that. So unlike other traditional agencies, we only focus on technology portion. So we don't do any creative work, but we do focus on development, migration, and making sure that everything on the website and our client base is digital media publishing enterprise level.

3:59So they have over a million page view per month. so with that you know the the platform the website is actually their platform that has to work very well so we try to do in three pillars which is like audience experience editor experience the developer experience so it's like a three-legged school that a stool that all three pillar has to balance and work together in order to be successful so that's our main thing so we differentiate ourselves with that and we like I said before we since only we only do technology work we partner with different creative agencies or even work with the clients, media or the creative departments to work together.

4:41So we were just kind of niching down and making sure that we're the technology expert for them. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the state of the union for WordPress. Where are we today? You know, I remember, you know, when we, I mean, I've been just a WordPress devotee for over a decade. And now I know that there are so many platforms, you know, that folks may be running aspects of their website on, but what's going on in WordPress world over the past year or so? So WordPress, it's interestingly enough, it's over more than 20 years now. Yeah, crazy. It was a 20 year anniversary. I don't remember exactly, but yeah.

5:23So over the course of the years, they started as a blogging tool. So a lot of people think it's just doing blogging tool, But it just developed into completely full, I don't know, like robust thing that you can do anything with. Because there are certain, some applications are like just like internet things. So it's just kind of like the backend where editorial is doing their thing. But the actual front-end side of it is completely different from websites. There's just applications. So one of the examples, we had a client that did the content creation on the WordPress site. But the actual front-end side was a video screen.

5:58that actually feature into the, like a different hallway video instead of websites. So there's various things that you can do and you can do a lot of different things. So like even the White House is using it. So like now I think it was a couple of years ago, the stat is a 43 % of the websites is hosted by WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think most of us realize, you know, WordPress is just, it's an infrastructure, it's a system, it's a platform that, you know, I remember just how exciting it was to just browse through all of the different available plugins and themes that you can use, which is so exciting because at the time I used to be a web developer way back in the day.

6:43And it's like WordPress just made speed to getting a website put together so much faster and then not have to pay for all this custom coding for all of these different thing because it was so ubiquitous. Miki, do you mind sharing a little bit specifically about the types of clients that you work with? So we, our main client base are digital media clients. So like a digital publishers, like a news publishers or like a periodical publishers. And then they do have a lot of contents, including like videos and like images or events or like a live events going on. So we usually deal with like a bigger scale clients that has a lot of integration with the ads and like different other things that you do on the websites.

7:29So the, there are scales a little higher. So like, but with that, we do have smaller clients that kind of like just kind of host smaller scale, like content publishing, but they still do a lot of content publishing day to day. So that's like our main client base. Yeah. And so how do people typically find you? Because obviously there's a lot of ways. I guess if you were to talk about Endeavor's USP or what makes Endeavor stand out compared to just hiring a developer on Upwork, just kind of Google searching around and trying to find a solution, where does Endeavor fit in? It's very cliche to say, but it's like we're the experts on and doing this for a long time.

8:18So my co-founder and I were in the industry for a long time. We started actually, especially for my co-founder, he actually started in a digital media with a timing. And he worked at MTV and those areas. And when I was I also am from New York area. So when I worked there, our clients are pretty much like the higher publishing company. So I worked at Hearst before and like in Time Inc, New York Times and companies like that. And they were our former clients as well. So usually with this bigger enterprise clients, they are referral based. So like they usually like to work with the people they already know or their peers already have credibility with.

9:00so so our clients were usually from the referral base and we're trying to do a little more outreach with like a different types of um like ads or things like that now but we just started but previously we're predominantly referral based and then the people we used to work with our old co-worker going to a different company because the the media digital media industries i think it's probably same with any other industries like it gets small when you know people so like you You know, it's like it's everyone knows each other and they go to a different company pretty much in the same industry. So with that, if you're working in an industry, you got to know people well.

9:38And then once you are known for doing a creating a great work, you kind of became that the people that you go to. Yeah. And Miki, in terms of like your own company growth and client growth, I mean, where do most of your clients come from? And what do you do to attract clients as kind of an agency and a web development specialist? A lot of it was referral from older clients or even other agencies too. Because since we used to do other CMSs like an open source or other like the Adobe ones or Rdrupal or Laravel, just the custom CMS and all these other ones before, but we decided to niche down to WordPress.

10:20So with that, we do work with other agencies a lot. So we refer to other, it's like some people think that it's a competitor, but when you work together very well, it's not always a competitor. You kind of help each other. So we will refer different Drupal agencies if there's like a Drupal work come in and then they will actually refer us to WordPress clients. So we do have a lot of that kind of a partnership going on. And also, because we don't do hosting. So we deal with the, we actually partner with the managed hosting because the scale that we're dealing with, we want to make sure that we recommend a dedicated hosting that can do 24-7, 99 % uptime.

11:01So with that, something that we want to make sure that we refer to a credible managed hosting. So we partner with them and they refer us some clients as well. Excellent. All right. Um, so maybe you could share a little bit about, uh, what is, what are best practices for, for, for high performing websites today? I mean, obviously, you know, on your website, you talk about speed. I mean, that's pretty important, of course. Um, but, but aside from that, just from a, uh, from a user experience standpoint or user interface standpoint, any trends that you've been doing a lot more like, or as if you've been doing facelifts of particular websites, like what are people asking for?

11:50So we do a light audit just to initially do, and we actually provide a free audit just for the client, for the potential clients or someone to just kind of understand where they stand. So we provide that so we can just go to our website to find that if you want. But when you do it, you want to make sure that your, so basic like legal stuff is there too, and then making sure that your page loads correctly, and all there's like any broken images and things like that, so making sure that those are intact, and also you want to make sure you monitor frequently and regularly, and then we try to provide the continuous monitoring just to make sure that before something goes down, we can catch it beforehand, so the basic things like that, and And also any security updates, like you want to make sure that the bot's not really attacking you.

12:38The forms have security measures so that you're not getting hit by a bot, but actually getting the people connecting with your websites and things like that. There's small things like that, but there's a lot more you can do about the basic level. You want to make sure that your page renders and then it doesn't take way long time. So like performance and then basic security and also some of the sites that collecting data, you need to make sure all the cookie consent and all the appropriate legal ramification is there. Yeah. Okay. So your website is Endeavor.io. It's N-D-E-V-E-R dot I-O. Do you have resources?

13:21Like what would you recommend for someone that's, you know, they're listening to our conversation? By the way, I should point out, you've worked with some pretty big brands, Univision, um bloomberg um and again folks can kind of see uh some of your portfolio on your website but uh what are next steps for our friend that's listening to this conversation oh if you want to find us you can go to just um endeavor.io slash contact and then there's a form that we can do a free consultation to kind of figure out where you stand and how we can help yeah um hey how is uh i know uh woocommerce is obviously a core component of WordPress.

13:59What's up with WooCommerce lately? So WooCommerce is an e-commerce portion. So it's plugin-based, but it's e-commerce. So you can do pretty much extensive e-commerce platform with WooCommerce. And WooCommerce is actually bought by Automatic, which is who created WordPress. So it's part of them. So the security and then actual maintenance is better after they acquire e-commerce. so but but one thing that we always for our commerce clients we want to make sure that if you're going to have a commerce make sure that you have a credible managed hosting because you're dealing with a lot of sensitive information as not to mention and like payments and then client information going on so you want to make sure that you're on a secure platform so for that we always recommend that make sure that you kind of invest in managed hosting that where the security is monitored by them 24-7.

14:51Yeah. All right. Mickey Huang, again, your website, Endeavor.io. Mickey, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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