Not too long ago, my coworkers produced a report to help understand small business owners. It’s filled with solid insights that will challenge your ideas on who small business owners are and where their priorities lie. I found, for myself it pointed out details I had overlooked, but, in hindsight, were staring me in the face.…

Creating work for myself has always been a challenge. It’s easy to get sucked into the possibility of the project and all it could be. I’m reminded of this challenge when I ask a client or colleague to define their first-ever creative brief. I empathize with the ways in which that’s a difficult task to…

My father ran his own business for most of his professional life. I always admired that he was able to venture out on his own and not take the easier route of working for someone else. I grew up knowing that running a small business was not easy, to say the least. Not only did…

As folks who design and build website creation tools, we tend to be very focused on just that: Creation. The birthing of the shiny new website that we know will help our customers achieve all their business goals and dreams. But sometimes, when we are wrapped up in perfecting this birthing process, we neglect to…

When I was in my early teens, I started using a tool called ResEdit to customize the splash screens of applications on my computer. I opened the original splash screen image files in GraphicConverter, added some new photos or text, and spliced my new graphic back into the application. Later, whenever I’d launch my web browser,…

Innovation done right is about understanding the soul of a thing — an object, a process, a piece of software. Furthermore, it is about using new technologies, contexts, or approaches to more effectively express that soul.

“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.” Pink Floyd When I was in school and later studying part-time at college, I founded several small online businesses. There was a freelance WordPress design service, multiple blogs, design showcases, commercial WordPress themes and even an audacious attempt to emulate the…

Recently, our product team conducted a research on small business owners who happen to be a significant part of the WordPress.com customer base. In the report, there was one thing that stuck with me so clearly I kept thinking about it: A “website first” approach may turn potential small business customers off. A perfect website isn’t our…