Part 2: The Future

I’ve never been a one project person and when I started self employment 52 weeks ago I had a few other ideas already on the go. Mid way thru the year I decided to hit pause on them to focus on plugins, which turned into one big project producing ToggleWP.

HeadsUpWP and Launch That Website were the two main projects (ABP.IO based portals) that were put on ice, while my C# based Website Toolkit crawler stayed for my hosting clients.

Before heading to WCEU a large number of established plugin vendors were reporting a drop in new sales, website visits and YouTube views. As I’m currently a tiny player my daily site traffic can be counted on one hand, which meant I wasn’t in a position to talk about that with others when heading to Krakow, so I focused on marketing my wares to interested people while keeping a longer term Plan B in mind.

A number of my plugins were small and utility focused, so I started investigating how ToggleWP could become more of a workflow solution, moving beyond a combined set of utilities.

The AI Writer module brought text content generation into the dashboard, in a controlled way, along with constructive feedback based on the provided Voice Profiles. However that wasn’t enough for me, and what it needed to really stand out and pack in the value. I still had thoughts of HeadsUpWP in mind, with its on demand content checks providing continued oversight and added value as part of peoples care plans.

With my legacy C# crawler getting towards the end of its days (as my access to sponsored Azure hosting was ending) I started work on a new Node JS replacement. This complete rebuild of Website Toolkit would cover both single URL checks triggered by ToggleWP, plus a standalone full site scan.

Single purpose broken links checkers are a crowded market so I started to think of ideas to put my spin on it. Researching competitors to feature match is a losing battle, so it needed something new to help my target audience of site builders / maintainers. The nitty gritty will be covered in a dedicated blog post (a bit more on it below), but I think it now has some great foundations to build on and fine tune.

As I was now rebuilding one past idea, that got me thinking about my Launch That Website portal. I started building that while still at Corporate, so it was on a familiar big business tech stack which would have had high running costs. I decided that now is the right time to also rebuild that as a module of Website Toolkit.

Over the last month Website Toolkit expanded from a single module to two – site audit and launch check lists. Since I started the original draft of this post it has gained a third and fourth – covering ongoing monitored changes and site migration projects. These will repurpose existing code but cover additional use cases so they are a good fit as part of the wider toolkit.

Sell shovels in a gold rush

In the back of my head I have always pictured having an ecosystem of products and services. From WordPress hosting, small business site builds, maintenance and oversight, ToggleWP and Website Toolkit will be closely integrated so that Toggle can cross-sell the toolkit, and vice versa, while still working independently of each other.

As more and more websites are being created with new AI assisted site building platforms, or AI agent created websites, it just makes sense to help with the go-live and on-going content checks, and less on the platform behind them. You wouldn’t expect visitors to care about your CMS.

I had some discussions at WCEU about making a free version of ToggleWP to go in the official repo, however since then I’ve decided to scrap that plan, along with the free non-repo version. Instead, a Standalone single site license (without support) is now available for client handovers.

My top priorities to kick off my 2nd year (July – Sept) = Marketing

One: My top priority needs to be my level of fitness, which is not great. Taking a half hour each day to focus on getting out for a short walk, or a virtual jog (if the kids are home and less than willing to leave the house), is something that I’ll need to get used to. By closing X down I could probably free up the same amount of time spent on that during the day. With the school holidays looming nearer we will be having family trips out which will help work towards this, I just need to keep it up on the other days.

Two: Marketing the ToggleWP Partner Programme. Directly advising agencies how to roll it out, and the best modules based on their client types, will help get some bums on seats and more awareness. I need to decide if my current approach is the best (open for people with 15+ sites), or if the additional guidance should be for those on the higher plans.
The next minor version is on its way soon (with some UI improvements), which will be followed by recording short videos on each module. Handy for marketing material, but also for end to end testing the proper way. Definitely need to get this done before the school holidays while the house is quieter.

Three: Website Toolkit will be offered for free during its preview period, planned for 1st July till 31st Aug. Hopefully this will be of interest to some others so I can get some early feedback. I have already started running it on some sites for people I work with to fine tune the results. WT also needs some intro videos to go on its new website. The site has been submitted to GSC and has now been indexed which was the first step.

Everything else: Fill in the blanks, my browser extension, could do with some intro videos as well.