Unlocking Your Brand's Potential with WordPress: Insights from the Executive Director Have you ever wondered how WordPress can transform your brand's narrative and enhance your online presence? Executive Director of WordPress, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, joined me on the SEJShow to discuss the impact of the open source model on WordPress's growth and economy and provides valuable insights on leveraging WordPress to tell your brand's story and succeed in the digital world. As WordPress marks its 20th anniversary, empowering individuals and organizations to share their narratives and establish their businesses, this episode provides a glimpse into WordPress's future and the unique ways marketers, entrepreneurs, and SMBs can capitalize on its evolving capabilities. WordPress enabled about half a trillion dollar economy based on everything people can do to create services and products inside the WordPress space. How we have created our marketplaces has been significant.–Josepha Haden,15:22 Like all the things with AI, I always ask my community to move slowly enough to be ethical but fast enough to be relevant. We're technology, and we have to be fast. Otherwise, we don't matter. But also, we are open source, so we always want to be as ethical as possible.–Josepha Haden, 36:02 The thing I think that makes Open Source so valuable in the history of WordPress and probably in the history of any open source project is that it not only has a bunch of freedoms for what anyone who wants to use our software can do and can have, but it also specifically includes freedoms from things that they should not have to deal with. Like they should be free from having someone suddenly change their terms of service and no longer having access to their content or, suddenly changing their algorithms and no longer having any access to the audiences that they worked so hard to gain on their sites and in their own spaces.–Josepha Haden, 10:12 [00:00] - About Josepha. [00:29] - The 20th anniversary of WordPress. [00:40] - SEJ's transition from Blogger to WordPress. [01:54] - The WordPress project timeline. [04:12] - Explanation of open-source project contributions. [14:32] - The economy of WordPress. [14:51] - SEO plugins in WordPress. [17:23] - How do plugin and theme developers monetize their work in the WordPress space? [20:25] - How has Gutenberg changed WordPress post publishing? [27:21] - Benefits for merchants using WordPress for ecommerce. [28:56] - Storytelling in ecommerce. [31:26] - The role SEO plays in WordPress' operation and its importance to users. [32:31] - Future of WordPress. [33:08] - WordPress' multilingual support. [34:12] - How WordPress is navigating enterprise-level customizations. [36:02] - Ethical considerations of WordPress & AI. [41:57] - The role & importance of the WordPress community in its success. Resources Mentioned: WordPress – https://WordPress.org A Bill of Rights for the Open Web – https://wordpress.org/news/2023/04/episode-54-open-webs-bill-of-rights/ WordPress Playground – https://wordpress.org/news/2023/04/episode-54-open-webs-bill-of-rights/ Yoast – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ All-In-One SEO – https://aioseo.com/ Rank Math – https://rankmath.com/ Josepha’s Blog – https://josepha.blog/ And for what it's worth, a group of existing agencies caters to enterprise clients in WordPress. We know, as WordPress is in the heart of us, that we can do that and support that. And we also can do that while keeping the heart of our open-source philosophies like we see it happening. WordPress.org/enterprise is the page that enterprise-specific agency leaders pulled together to help us get more awareness that WordPress is an excellent choice for enterprise implementations and clients.–Loren Baker, 45:24 One of the goals of Gutenberg was to lower the barrier to entry for new users of WordPress by creating this block standard. The idea was that everyone would