Our Goals for 2021

Last year I told you 2020 would be an interesting year… and boy, was I right! I never would have imagined how strange this past year could be and I was simply talking about all the things we had planned for 2020, but life is always surprising. Luckily, we and our relatives have been able to go through 2020 without major complications. As Toni shared with you last week, Nelio is still afloat and we have adapted very well to working remotely. So, what do we ask of this 2021?

Marketing Strategy: Our Website and Blog

Our website and, more specifically, our blog are the main advertising and communication channel we use at Nelio. We have always opted for an inbound marketing strategy, creating content that may be interesting and useful to you. And, so far, this strategy has worked pretty well.

As the saying goes, “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” So here’s what we’ll be doing:

• Publish one post weekly. We will continue to generate quality content for you, although we will reduce the rate of publication to one weekly post in order to invest more resources in the development and maintenance of our products.
• Tutorials, tips and tricks, tests, and interviews. As we have been able to observe throughout all these years, the posts you like the most are those that either solve specific WordPress problems or teach some tips and tricks. We’ve noted this and that’s what we’ll be doing this year.
• Increase our participation in social media. Since we’ll be publishing fewer posts, we’ll increase our interactions on social media. We’ll be sharing more links and useful resources there, so stay tuned!

Finally, we’re also considering paid reviews to promote our plugins on other websites, hoping that this will help us reach a wider audience. We don’t know yet where or how we’ll do this… but, whatever happens, be sure we’ll share the results with you!

WordPress Community

Toni’s paternity, my ankle surgery, and the global pandemic were some of the reasons for our not being excessively commited to the WordPress community. Sure, Ruth participated in WordCamp Europe and we “attended” WordCamp Spain, but we want to do more for this community.

Our aim this year is to get involved with WordPress again. We still don’t know the specific contributions we’ll be making, because it partly depends on the evolution of the pandemic, but we’ll be doing some for sure. Some contributing ideas for 2021: fix bugs, translate WordPress, and get involved with online/offline events.

Nelio A/B Testing

I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.

Josette Millar

WordPress.org

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Nelio Plugins

Nelio was born in 2013 with the idea of creating products for WordPress. Since then, we have created two premium plugins: Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content. As you may already know, these are the core of our business, so our 2021 goals include enhancing Nelio’s portfolio.

Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content

Last year was a good year for Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content. And I’m not talking about revenue, as the number of users each product has remained more or less constant. I’m talking from a technical perspective: we redesigned and re-implemented both plugins from scratch to modernize them, make them more secure, and ease their evolution.

This year we’ll continue the improvement trend we started:

• Update internal dependencies. A few weeks ago, for example, we saw that Gutenberg will eventually get rid of momentjs and replace it with a new JavaScript library (date-fns) once they fix a few issues. Our plugins still use momentjs and, even though it’s perfectly fine, we want them to stay in tune with WordPress, which means we’ll be replacing momentjs too.
• React Hooks. Our plugins are implemented using higher-order components. However, there’s now a better way to “extend” components using React Hooks. This is something that, again, Gutenberg has recently integrated in its codebase and we want to follow the same approach too. This will help us evolve our plugins slowly but steadily.
• TypeScript Integration. During the past few weeks we’ve been talking a lot about TypeScript – I think it’s an awesome technology to craft more robust code. Unfortunately, Nelio Content and Nelio A/B Testing are implemented with “vanilla” JavaScript… so migrating the code to TypeScript sounds like a good idea, especially if you take into account that such migration can be done incrementally.

Nelio Unlocker

Even though we’re very happy with the two plugins we have, the truth is we always think about what we can do next. Last year we had several online meetings to brainstorm new product ideas and think about the problems you may have in WordPress and how we can contribute a solution.

And we found one.

Did you create a page with Divi and you’d rather have it implemented in Gutenberg? Do you like a design you’ve seen somewhere else and want to import it into your WordPress? Do you want to migrate a page from Visual Composer to Elementor? That’s what’s our new plugin’s all about!

During the past few months we’ve been developing our next product: Nelio Unlocker. Nelio Unlocker is a plugin that allows you to convert the layout and content of any page to any page builder.

Right now the plugin is in beta and only allows conversions from any page builder to Gutenberg, but we’ll be adding new target page builders during the upcoming weeks/months. We expect this plugin to be extremely helpful to both users and developers, as it’ll help them escape the dreaded lock-in effect and offer a convenient way for migrating content safely and generating a result page that is quick and easy to manipulate.

Here are the goals we’ve set for this plugin:

• Launch and Marketing. We’ll release the plugin in the upcoming days, because we want you to give it a try ASAP. We also plan to run a few campaigns to reach a broader audience and let everybody know about it. Stay tuned, as we’ll be detailing what we did to promote the plugin and how each action worked 🙂
• Product-Market Fit Evaluation. We obviously think that this plugin is a valuable and useful tool, but our opinion doesn’t matter much. That’s why we want you to let us know if we’re on the right path. We want to see how many people use and like the plugin, so that we can determine its actual value and feasibility.
• Evolution. We’re also expecting a lot of feedback from its users, especially considering all we have right now is a beta version. We already know we’ll be supporting more page builders, but you’re the ones who’ll dictate how Nelio Unlocker should grow and evolve.

And that’s it! Pretty interesting, right? We’re very excited about this new year… and we hope you are too!

Oh, and, BTW: happy 2021!

Featured Image by Tonik on Unsplash.