Smashing WordPress

We've talked about how to smash WordPress into greatness with one of the founders of Smashing Magazine, Vitaly Friedman.

Here's the full transcript:

Good afternoon for most of you and actually good evening for me, it’s 11 p.m. here. It is also 11 p.m. for my guest I think because we’re actually from Europe. For those of you who don’t know who we got on yeah we’ve got Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine on. Hi Vitaly and thanks for being here.

Thanks for being here to and thanks for the opportunity to be here. Indeed it is 11 p.m. here, so it’s kind of dark outside.

It is a good time to do the show because this is about the only time of the day I’m quite sure I’ll be at home. Could you quickly introduce yourself to those who don’t know who you are and don’t know what Smashing magazine is?

I’m 24 years old and my name is Vitaly Friedman. I am living in Germany actually so most people don’t really know that. Most people assume Smashing magazine exists and has always been founded in the US. That’s not true. Smashing magazine is basically well magazine related to design and web development and we cover many different topics related to fundamental concepts so to say.

We’re trying to give the most useful and interesting information for designers and developers out there and we do it in English so that as many people as possible can get this information.

Yeah you’ve been doing websites before Smashing magazine, quite a few actually. I remember you doing some sort of CSS listing a long time ago.

Yeah it was a long time ago. I was young and inexperienced then. I started designing websites back in 1998. It was a cool time and actually Google just came up so everybody was excited. I actually remember starting to use search engines back in 1997 I think or ’96 and Yahoo was my first website. So it was quite cool.

Then it turned out it was quite clearly interesting to do something that many people can access all around the world 24 hours a day. So it was kind of exciting then, it is still now but I have other things to do. But I was doing freelance in 2000 until 2005 and have created a lot of websites, not very good ones but I can look back now and they’re kind of weird.

In 2004 to 2005 I was really excited about all the CSS stuff and I spent I think 2 or 3 weeks until all this was done. Then there was this huge developer’s handbook that got (4:25 – inaudible) somehow and then it caused a server crash. Then that led me to doing web design and writing about web design and editing web design articles.

So a huge leap from then to now. You guys started Smashing Magazine not really that long ago, it feels to me at least.

Yeah it feels to me the same.

And basically it became an overnight success. What happened there? Do you have any idea of how it became such a success in such a small time?

The truth is we don’t’ know. Then what we did back in 2006, it was September 2006 when we founded the magazine and it was just a basic random experiment. My colleague who was working on his own German magazine for 8 or 9 years then, he just suggested we could do something like that in English and try to publish some articles and create some stuff that would be useful for the audience for web developers and designers.

So we did it. Then somehow it turned out what we were doing and what we were doing was extremely useful for many designers and developers. So the key was that most articles or all articles we’ve published on Smashing magazine had to be relevant. So we had to be able to go back to Smashing magazine when we were developing website ourselves. So it was our own collection of data or information or useful stuff that we could use as well. It turned out that many people all around the world could use this information as well.

And somehow one thing led to another and from 1 or 2 articles a week, we got to 5, 6, 7 and 8 and now we got back to 5 again.

And you added all those articles or how does this process work?

We have a lot of writers and many writers do not get Smashing Magazine because our articles don’t (6:45 – inaudible) on that. So we came up with some hard and rough quality guidelines that need to be met in every article that gets published in Smashing Magazine.

So every article is being read by myself but since I’m not always….you know sometimes if we have some news articles that are not quite in my expertise then we go to experts of people who really know the stuff and people who are quite famous in the community and they’re getting paid as well. We get their feedback and proof the articles over and over again. Most articles go back and forth like 4 or 5 times and this is why most articles they take 20 to 25 hours to prepare.

Yeah so that basically means 100 hours a week if you have 5 posts a week, something like that.

Yeah something like that yeah.

So that means a lot of people investing a lot of time.

Yeah you’re exactly right and so it’s not just me or my colleagues working on the articles but also many, many people across the world. For example, we also use Twitter to get some insight or useful links to data that could improve the articles. So really a big huge mix of information coming to us like a stream and then it all somehow gets published in a very compact way in very extensive articles.

Yeah that’s what you became famous for of course for doing actually decent articles instead of the short stuff I do, for instance.

Thanks we try to do our best.

Yeah it is a great style which a lot of people have been trying to follow after you were one of the first to start it like this I think. But my biggest question would be you’ve got all these articles, how do you pick which ones will be a success? Most of them are like success in social media all the time. There is a lot of stuff that you probably need to do well to get to that. What is important? What makes a killer post?

It is a good question. We do have a list of things that need to be done for the article to be successful. So we need good body copy and we need some good ideas and we need some really good practical tips. Essentially what is really important in every article is that the reader is able to read the article, scan it and not necessarily read it completely but scan it and get some information immediately. After reading the post the article must be able to convey some useful information, useful practical tips to the audience.

In order to do that these articles need to be essentially each paragraph has been revised many, many times. It’s been, we look at many things like is the idea of the article really conveyed in this article paragraph? Is there a clear line? So a lot of copy editing is included as well. We have a proofreader who also takes care of all the grammar and all the stuff to make sure the article is fluent and can be read quickly and well written and follows a major style.

In the end, we’re trying to use many, many aspects that we have from our expertise and we know what our readers expectations are, what they’re looking for, what the articles should have and then we try to put it all and if the article doesn’t have it either the writer has to reedit or revise it or it is declined.

Okay. The question that comes to mind immediately also from one of my friends at IPhone.nl who is in the chat room with the exact same name, he wonders how you find all these sites you reference? I’m guessing that a lot of these sites you don’t find but your writers find, right?

Well we have a little secret but I think I can give it away now. The truth is most blogs out there, other design blogs I should say, they have some very strict area of design sites that they’re looking for when preparing a post. So what we have is all across the world on many different continents we have people who are involved in the design communities there. Like we have people in South America, we have people in Asia; we have people in Russia and so on, so when a topic comes up and we are looking for some useful stuff for an article about icons, we’re asking all these people to try to find some interesting links or resources you can also use in the article. Of course, they’re getting paid as well. So that is what sets us apart so to say.

We are not fixed on this American English speaking audience or American English speaking design blogs Right?

Yeah you actually make it into a global community instead of the usual US.

Exactly. That is also why in many cases articles published in Smashing Magazine it is really different posts on other blogs. Although these other posts on other blogs are quite similar. So we’re trying to make it different by using a more global approach.

Yeah you’ve also done a lot of free stuff like WordPress templates and stuff like that. What is the rationale behind that? Is it because people like it and love seeing those or is there a separate reason for doing it?

We never require a back link or something. Smashing Magazine was supposed to deliver high quality stuff for free. So we always try to create some really good stuff and make it available for everybody because we know, for instance, just a quick story. We had an email from a teacher from South Africa who had sent us a pretty lengthy email about the way he educate his students. They don’t have anything at all there. They have some books but that’s basically all they have.

They have internet connection and he was extremely grateful for all the free stuff, all the tutorials and stuff that we are giving away for free. This one email was exactly what we were looking for. So I want to make these freebies available for everybody, make high quality resources available for everybody that improves the design over all and help the design community get better results in the end without a lot of cost and effort.

Yeah and you’re succeeding very well. You’re also working on a book or actually that’s going to be out quite soon. I would like to talk about that a little more right after the break which is coming up right now.

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We’re back with Vitaly Freidman from Smashing Magazine. You guys have gone the other way around from a lot of publishers. You’ve gone from blog to book which seems that a lot of people are looking at doing. Why did you to the step of publishing a book?

It was basically very simple. We really wanted to improve our branding not only online but also offline. So we wanted to publish something that would be useful as well and we wanted to explore this other domain we hadn’t touched at all. So we came up with the idea of okay we’ll do something really cool and pretty simple and not too complicated. So we would do something cool and publish some permanent book that will be available for designers and web developers with a goal beyond the limits of the online world.

We have reached some kind of level online and we do see some improvement that can be done if we truly try some other domains.

Cool and for those people listening who are anxiously awaiting their ordered books you told me they won’t be shipping for a short while yet, will they?

Yeah we have had a problem. The truth is the whole process was really complicated and a lot of headache. We had writers dropping out, we had lay out problems, we had production delays and we got it all.

Welcome to traditional publishing.

Yeah exactly and if we did a digital one we would probably have less problems. But nevertheless we really wanted to publish this book in September for our 3rd anniversary and we didn’t make it. So we thought okay we’ll try to do it in October but we didn’t make it as well and we will not make it this month.

So we’re expecting the book to start shipping mid-November. It is not a good date I think and many people really, we’re sorry for all this waiting for the people who ordered the book in August or September who are waiting right now for many months now. But there was nothing we could do. So the book has been printed, actually finished printing and it will be shipped, all this stuff takes apparently a lot of time and way too much time in our opinion.

Yeah as I said welcome to the world of offline publishing. It’s a pain in the ass.

Yeah that’s right. There is nothing we can do really but I can guarantee everybody who ordered the book will also get a nice surprise. So we will make it up to your guys.

So looking back to WordPress which is what I usually talk about on this show of course you’ve been on WordPress from the beginning right?

Right.

(21:29 – tape garbled) WordPress?

Very simple, my colleague was using WordPress for 3 or 4 years and had a good experience with it. So we thought okay maybe we can use some stuff like some plug ins if they’re written especially for the other German magazine, maybe we could just reintegrate them into the new WordPress and use them as well.

So since it was an experiment and wasn’t supposed to become huge but it did, we thought okay we’ll scrape some things and put something together and see how it goes and it went pretty well.

Yeah it did. So one of the questions from the chat room is how many headaches has WordPress been causing you over the last few years?

Well we had many, many problem of course. We had many optimization problems like performance problems. Not everybody knows that Smash Magazine cannot be hosted on a dedicated server so I think we have 8 servers right now. It is a lot of pain and it costs a lot of money, of course, so we need to pay bills which are not that small.

Also on the 2nd of September and it was a black day for Smashing magazine we were kind of attacked. So someone used a security hole in the WordPress but fortunately our system administrator has fixed it. He spent the whole night mirroring the server and trying to fix the problem and he did.

But WordPress causes us many problems but it serves us very well also. So we need to find a good balance between negative and positive sides.

Yeah to be honest I’m a bit shocked to hear that that it takes 8 servers. The fact you can’t run on one I can completely see but it should be able to run on a lot less than 8 it seems to me.

for instance we have 2 media servers for the images.

Yeah well that of course but you don’t spread these out? You have these servers next to each other or do you use a constant distribution network all across the globe?

We use a constant distribution network. The truth is I’m not a technical guy and our system administrator is taking care of it.

Okay I won’t bug you too deeply then. I would love to take it on and well Frederick I guess you know Frederick Townes as well right?

Yeah Frederick is a great guy.

Yeah we’ve worked on some sites together. Another site he optimized recently to load a bit more quickly is Nupe.com.

Oh that’s cool that’s a good…

I looked at that site, to be honest; I really looked at that site for the first time like 3 weeks ago when Frederick was on the show when he pulled it up. Then a week or so later I hear you guys are buying Nupe.com.

Yeah that’s true.

So you are now own Nupe as well. What was the reason for you guys to buy Nupe.com?

The reason is very simple and there are 2 reasons actually. Nora who was the owner of Nupe is a good friend of ours. And over the last 8 to 10 months we’ve been discussing Nupe.com and she was telling us that she was going to sell the site because she had some private issues to take care of. We thought okay we’re not really interested but it’s nice to keep it mind.

Then we came up with some new ideas that we couldn’t really use in Smashing Magazine. The problem is that we used to have 7 to 8 articles per week and then it turned out that it doesn’t really work. Many people just don’t read the articles. Then we got less traffic, which was quite unusual but we did.

So we thought okay we’ll do it another way, we’ll tweak this to 5 or 6 posts per week and then we’ll see how it goes and it went much better. So the truth is that we cannot publish like some original, very exciting, very unusual stories in Smashing Magazine because people are expecting other stories. People are expecting something really high quality and something that went through experts and so on.

However, something like interviews or some other formats we came up with cannot be used there. So we thought okay we can use this format and present new articles, new posts, new kinds of things on Nupe. So the truth is we just tried to…I don’t like many people to think okay the big fish is hitting the small fish that’s not the truth. The truth is we want to try some new ideas on Nupe. We will make sure it’s of the highest quality and we will only improve it.

For instance, we will involve our experts and people who are working with us to help us make the article through Smashing but at the same time we don’t want to change it completely. We want to have some new ideas published there and maybe some new concepts published there but then we really hope we’ll make it better for the design community and for Nupe’s community as well.

I was just surprised to see it and it’s a cool development that one blog picks up another. It’s a good thing. Another good question in the chat room is if you guys ever considered using Buddy Press to use and create a design community?

We actually have a forum, we have a community. We really discuss many different options and we thought okay we’ll try with PHBBB forum…

So you go from WordPress, which is like security and then you to PHBBB?

Yeah.

Which is probably 10 times worse.

Yeah we found out too late I think. Anyway we don’t know which direction Smashing Magazine forum will go next. We definitely want to improve it because we also see some things happening there like all the spam and we also have moderators now who are fighting it and so on.

It is looking quite well for a forum because most forums I see around are like butt ugly and the Smashing forum actually looks really good. I have to admit though I don’t spend any time there, so I wouldn’t know about the content. Is that something that attracts a lot of users to your site or not?

It cannot be compared to the attention we get from posts. We do have some regular visitors there, some regular members and active ones and we also have some give aways and all the stuff to kind of attract users attention to the forum but it is not that attractive somehow. I’m not sure why. I think the forums nowadays are more or less not dead but they are not as attractive as like Twitter.

No that actually would be a good reason to go onto Buddy Press I guess to make it more into a community and less into what is a pretty static forum of course.

Yeah that’s a good point. We’ll definitely consider it in the future.

It would be very cool. We would love to see it and I’m sure there are a couple of guys out there who would be willing to help you work Buddy Press into it.

That’s cool.

Although we’ll have to work on the performance issues as well because Buddy Press isn’t going to speed it all up.

Okay cool.

Let’s say some of the people listening would like to write a guest post for Smashing or for Nupe for that matter, where should they start?

First of all we have a contact us button, a connect to us link in our sidebar and we have some information for our writers. We have a Become an Author link as well. So first of all readers can get some insight of what we’re expecting and what they should be doing.

For instance, there are some topics that are not going so well and there are some topics we’re looking for all the time. We’re always looking for visibility topics, Photoshop and Illustrator and CSS as well. If someone is interested, just go to SmashingMagazine.com and look on the sidebar and they’ll find a lot of information.

Then if you’re really interested and would like to get in touch with us, there is also a contact form where you can submit the data and we’ll get back to you over the next 24hours, we always do.

Okay cool. We’ve done some small work together but I haven’t written a post for you guys, so I wanted to know how the process really works. But they would have to be prepared to spend some time, I guess?

I think you’ve written a great Studio plug in right?

Yeah that was the one thing I did. So we’re going to get into some more questions but we have to run one more commercial break to pay some bills.

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We’re back and a very good question I got from Justin was he said, never mind your success what was the low point and how did you get through it?

Oh we have a good low point. In the beginning of the year we tried many different new topics and concepts and one of them was the famous Smashing comic strip. Oh my gosh, people tore it apart and the worst point ever. It was not so bad actually but many people just misunderstood it I think. We had more comments than ever before and we just never published the next issue of the comic strip ever. It was a really simple and basic solution I think.

What went wrong there did you think? Were you not getting what your readers want? How could you have prevented that?

What went wrong was that it wasn’t funny I think. Many people expected the comic strip to be funny and it wasn’t funny at all. It was an introduction to the upcoming Smashing comic series but most people I think thought it was not the introduction but the first issue and then they just didn’t understand it I think. But I was, of course, our fault because we didn’t communicate it clearly.

In order to prevent this, well I’m not sure what we could do in this case. We really thought it was very well designed and also looked quite unusual for Smashing Magazine so it was something different. But we were wrong. But it’s also pretty cool to have a low point right?

Yeah it is pretty important to have one I guess. Do you spend your time full time on doing Smashing Magazine now or how much time do you spend on it?

Smashing Magazine is now full time. It used to be a part time job while I was studying computer science and mathematics in Germany but now it is full time and right now we even have not as many resources so I’m completely booked for the next I don’t know how many months. Right now it’s tough with the book and upcoming projects and so on and so it takes I think at least 11 to 12 hours a day. But usually it takes much more time.

Yikes! I know how it feels but it’s tough to actually have to spend that much time on a pet project.

Absolutely. We have the book, we have other things coming up so it is kind of tough right now but we’ll get along I think. I just hope that next year will be less hectic.

I can promise you one thing, unless you do something about it, it will be more hectic not less.

Okay.

Another question from the chat room is you’ve got a blog roll with some pretty cool blogs on it. How do people get on that? Is it only for people who have written for Smashing or what?

Not necessarily. Basically, you just need to ping us, Twitter us or email us and then we’ll take a look and if it’s a good designed blog or it doesn’t have to be big, it can be small one but if it has good content you’ll get on our blog roll. So it’s no secret, if you have high quality articles just write to us and we’ll get it sorted.

And that’s telling them how much they like my articles since I’m not on there.

Well you never asked I think.

Yeah I did not ask. That’s because I don’t ever think about SEO. It’s not exciting. You guys run some analytics I guess on a site like this. What is the stuff you look at to measure how you’re doing?

We look at many points. First of all, over the last year we’ve seen that Twitter has become incredibly important and Digg has become incredibly unimportant. So it was a huge change for us. It is really happening right now, Digg is not important for us any more at all.

So how many leads was Digg sending to you and is now sending to you? Has it dropped tremendously?

Absolutely we used to have over 3,000 or 4,000 Diggs and it was a lot of traffic. It was like an incredible amount of traffic. I think overall probably maybe 70,000 to 80,000.

Yeah I’ve seen stuff like that.

If the story really stays on the front page and gets on top 10 then it can get a lot of traffic but it’s kind of hard to get there. We don’t do anything at all, we don’t even push the stories and I don’t know it just doesn’t work for us.

At the same time, Twitter is doing much better. So what we’re looking for usually is back links, we also take a look at the comments, how well the overall reaction is, the number of comments as well and Stumble Upon bookmarks are always important. Yeah I think that’s the most important part and we also use not Google Analytics but we use Clickie which is great. The guys behind Clickie have created…

Yeah I’ve used Clickie in the past and I’m not using it right now but I know how it works. Yeah it’s absolutely a good tool to use.

Yeah exactly and so it’s really helpful just to get an idea of what our readers are looking for. What is also very useful is just to look at what people on Twitter are writing because for some reason not just for when they’re replying to our post but if you are doing a search like Smash Mag or the title of our last article, you can get a lot of opinions and often interesting impressions on what people really think about it because they don’t actually send it to Smashing Magazine. So their reaction is more or less objective right.

Yeah. Cool. I don’t know if you’ve seen this but it’s a question from one of the people in the chat room, have you seen the new forum by Pro Blogger, the paid bloggers forum?

I haven’t visited it yet, should I?

No the idea is basically do you think there would be room for something like a paid even though it’s only a small amount per month forum kind of thing for bloggers? Do you think since it’s all available out there for free people won’t ever bother to pay for it anymore?

There is one thing, for instance, some really time consuming articles like case studies that we have they take maybe 80 to 85 hours, it’s an incredibly huge amount of time and many, many people are involved. And it’s also awfully expensive. So every case study that is published in Smashing Magazine, we’d have to have portfolio of case study, web forum design study and so on and it’s an incredible amount of time.

So in the end we cannot afford to, we couldn’t afford to publish them. So if the content is extremely like very useful and takes a lot of time I think people would be ready to pay I don’t know how many but it needs to be really the crème de la crème, right?

Yeah.

But I don’t know there is a lot of free content out there that’s true. But not all this content is high quality, not all this content is really delivering something that people can actually use right away or it may be not extensive enough or whatever. So I don’t know really.

(45:18 – overtalking).

We don’t know yet. At the moment, we’re trying to do our best with Smashing Magazine and we have the book coming up so I have no idea.

Cool. Vitaly I want to thank you for being here. It has been an absolute pleasure to have you on. We’re going to round it up so I can get out of here at a pretty decent time tonight.

Thanks for inviting me as well.

Yeah.

It was really great and I’m really glad something like podcast for web designers exists. And actually to be honest I didn’t know it existed so it’s really cool. I’ll be tuning in.

It’s about time we do a review of web designer podcasts on Smashing Magazine.

Indeed.

Yeah. We’ll have a talk about that. Thanks again and everyone listening please remember to tune in next week at 2 p.m. Pacific and 5 p.m. Eastern, 11 p.m. CET and we’ll be talking next week with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz about SEO for bloggers. The good news is that all the questions you can’t get answered next week you’ll probably be able to have answered the week after that when we talk to Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com to continue the discussions on SEO for bloggers.

I hope to see you all next week and thanks for listening.