“WordPress as a platform is putting us on the enterprise path. But what got us here is what makes us irrelevant,” says Magne Ilsaas, CEO and Founding Partner of Dekode. Magne wants to start an overdue conversation about three big risks — and opportunities — for WordPress agencies: 1) A lack of spaces for professional conversations and knowledge-sharing, including professional events, meetups, and mastermind groups catering to enterprise WordPress. 2) Successful agencies that use WordPress extensively with little or no community involvement whose work would benefit from enterprise WordPress peer networks. 3) An over-emphasis in WordPress agencies on short-term engineering solutions to the exclusion of long-term business solutions. What’s often left out is design, user experience, and most of all the capacity to play a strategic advisory role in partnership with clients.
I think an all-in-one sort of solution for niches is a good idea. Not everybody wants to deal with the technicalities of installation and hosting. Pick a domain, choose a theme, pay monthly and have someone hold your and a bit. That sounds useful.
I agree with you Brian – calling it hosting is probably not the wisest choice. Their choice of TLD goes along with that – if you want to serve a historically non-technologically savvy market, you should cater to them with your domain name, your offering, and your copy.
I think hosted & managed WordPress offerings for verticals like this is a great business model and we’ll likely see many more of them this year.