WPWeekly Episode 177 – Hanging Out With GoDaddy

Over the years, GoDaddy has become a company people love to hate. Whether it’s poor server performance or the actions of former CEO, Bob Parsons, the company has garnered a negative reputation. Within the last two years however, GoDaddy has implemented several changes to turn the company around.

In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by three GoDaddy employees:

Jeff King, General Manager of Hosting and Security

Mendel Kurland, WordPress evangelist

Kurt Payne, developer of the P3 plugin and GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress platform

We discuss changes made after Bob Parsons stepped down as CEO and how they’ve helped create a new culture within the company. Kurland describes what it’s like to be the first WordPress evangelist and explains his role in helping to establish relationships with people in the WordPress ecosystem. Payne provides details on GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting platform and what makes it different from competitors.

Later in the show, we talk about the decision to remove ticketing and email support in favor of phone and live chat support. We find out the lessons the company learned when it auto activated SIDEKICK on customer’s sites without notifying them. Near the end of the interview, King shares details on a new product called GoDaddy Pro, which will make it a lot easier to manage clients on the GoDaddy platform.

The biggest takeaway from the interview is that, GoDaddy has made and continues to make radical changes. It’s not the same company of a few years ago. If you’ve written them off in the past, I encourage you to give them a second look.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 4.2 Will Automatically Enable Pretty Permalinks for New Sites on Installation
BuddyPress 2.2 Beta 1 Now Available for Testing
Preview the New Design for the WordPress Themes Directory

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

WP Email Logs Plugin stores any email sent by the wp_mail() function in a log file within the database. Details logged include: from and to user ids, from and to email address, mail subject, mail content, component, type, send date, and more.

Internal Notes adds a simple textarea to the post and page editors where you can add notes regarding a particular post or page.

FaceBook Feed allows you to easily display a customizable feed of your Facebook Page on the frontend of WordPress.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, January 28th 9:30 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #177:
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