Will Strohl's Blog

I'm excited to share some new services I've introduced to help business owners and digital teams gain clarity, reduce friction, and move forward with confidence. These offerings are designed to meet you where you are—whether you're just starting out, feeling stuck, or ready to scale.

If you’ve ever had a one-on-one with me, whether through a business networking group, DNN project, or just a casual “hey, I’ve got an idea” moment — then you already know this...

Hey friends,

If you’ve been around the DNN world for a while, you know I’ve worn a lot of hats in the community — speaker, module dev, consultant, core team member, and that guy who’s always posting memes during conference breaks. 😉

So it probably won’t surprise you that this announcement is both exciting and, well… a little overdue.

As you may or may not have realized, we at Upendo Ventures put up a content bounty last month. We challenged the community to do two things... First, create new content to help promote content related to DNN and DNN Summit. Second, we wanted all of you to spread the word to the rest of the community to help generate the content, but also simply to just spread the good word that is DNN. Here are the results of that bounty.

DNN Summit is right around the corner, and this year it's going to be a hybrid event. Those of us who are willing and able, will be meeting up in Las Vegas, but the majority of the event will happen online again. I wanted to let you know what we - Upendo Ventures - are doing for you this time...

Google Analytics is often taken-for-granted in too many ways. When the average company thinks about Google Analytics, they simply ensure their Google Analytics code is in place and they keep track of what I refer to as vanity metrics. Copy. Paste. Done, right? Vanity metrics are quite deceiving, to be honest, and you’re only scratching the surface with what you could (and probably should) be doing with Google Analytics. In this article, we’re going to discuss how to dive deeper into your Google Analytics integration to grow your business.

If you didn’t already know, CMS is an acronym for “content management system.”  A CMS is used by many developers, consultancies, and companies to build their website.  It’s an incredibly common thing to do, as any flavor of CMS you choose will always save you effort and money, compared to building a website from nothing.  This is especially true if you look at the lifetime investment of your website.  Using a CMS framework or solution of some kind just seems to make sense.  After all, this is what I’ve built my own career upon since 2001.  However, then, CMS was known as a portal or portal framework.  That’s a long time ago, so it’s not a bad idea to take stock of things every now and thing to see if what you’re doing is the correct thing.  To this end, I asked myself, “How is CMS doing right now, and does it make sense to still be doing CMS-related work in the future?”

Practice makes perfect, right?  At least that’s what “they” say.  In this case, we attempted to do a special edition DNN Hangout about DNN and GitHub.  Unfortunately, the first time we did it, we only showed a single screen.  So we did it again!  In this hangout, we focus on the process and steps that are performed when you contribute to the DNN GitHub project.  This will be helpful to not only understand the process, but also get some ideas for process in your own projects.

It’s been several years since I last updated the skin on my site.  Thanks to Ralph Williams, the site is looking really good again and it’s responsive.  If you need a new design for your site, I highly recommend him.  However, the process to get to this blog post was quite tumultuous – chock full of hours troubleshooting and continuous frustration spread over the past week.  Simply put, my site “appeared” to be loading okay whenever I came to it, but I rarely browsed my own site.  The process of rolling out my new design had revealed to me that this couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Gizmodo originally publish an article where they editorialized the most recent video released by Microsoft.  They even took a light-hearted jab at them, joking about needing a lot more hand sanitizer due to touch interfaces.  I would be more concerned about there needing to be a lot more screen cleaners everywhere to counter-act our greasy fingers!