Episode 40: Dale Reardon

Hallway Chats

English - March 15, 2018 09:30 - 35 minutes - 41.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 17 ratings
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Previous Episode: Episode 39: Cory Webb

Next Episode: Episode 41: Mark Wahl

Dale Reardon is from Australia and is the founder of My Disability Matters. An online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie.

Introducing Dale Reardon

Show Notes

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 40.

Introducing Dale Reardon
Show Notes

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 40.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re chatting with Dale Reardon. Dale is from Australia and is the founder of My Disability Matters. An online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie. Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale: Thank you very much for having me.

Tara: Hi, Dale. It’s great to meet you. Welcome to Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? It’s a great introduction Liam gave. Where can you go from there?

Dale: Yes. I live in Hobart, Tanzania. Right down the end of the world, far away from yourselves. I’ve been using the internet and computers online for a long time since 1996 I’ve been on the internet. And actually started as a child using the Challenger 4Ps and 8P computers from what the Americans know as Radioshack. We had Tandys here in Australia. Then about seven and a half years ago, I started using WordPress which is what we’re talking about more today, of course. I started using the Genesis Framework and in the recent years moved on to using the drag and drop screen editors such as Divi and Avada and Beaver Builder. Yes, over the time, I’ve come from using WordPress for simply a more static site to using forums such as bbPress and membership sites. Now, actually, I’m using it for a fully-fledged community using the PeepSo Software to run a community for the disability sickness, and now I’m using WordPress to its very full extent and powers.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve heard of PeepSo. How many people do you have in that community?

Dale: Just this morning it clocked over 3100. Yeah, it is growing quite nicely and they’re getting engaged. We did actually use BuddyPress when we started but one thing I’ve learned with BuddyPress, even though the core plugin is very good and a good community product, of course. To get the many features that you need, you have to use so many different add-on plugins from different developers, which causes at times conflicts and lack of support and minor little bugs. Whereas PeepSo is what can be described as a freemium product with the core product of PeepSo being free, and then all the paid add-ons, they’re produced by the same development team. So you’re assured of compatibility, and support, and updates every couple of weeks. It’s just proven a much more powerful system for our community.

Tara: Yeah, I remember paying a lot of attention to it when it came out. Maybe two or three years ago PeepSo came out, right? Because I was doing a site with BuddyPress as well.

Dale: Yes, the current owners, Matt and Eric, took it over from the former owner about 12 months ago. They’ve really been developing it, they’ve made some strides. We’ve actually paid them to do some custom work, which then they released as paid add-ons for other people. Eric is just a fantastic project manager, which is so important to software development products, to make sure you don’t just make good program, as you do actually need someone to manage the whole project. And that’s one strength that PeepSo really has that’s been beneficial to us.

Tara: Yeah. Your disability forum that you have, is that your full-time job? Is that something that you monetized, how does that work?

Dale: Yes. It’s what we would call a start-up business at the moment. We’re certainly viewing it as our full-time job. My wife is my business partner and co-founder. We are, yes, developing that as our full-time business and income source. We’re not monetizing it as highly at the moment, we have had some sponsored posts on the news side. We do have some paid business members and we’ve had one large disability provider come on as a sponsor partner. But yeah, we certainly hope as we get more and more members, which we may need acquiring through Facebook ads, then yes, as we grow, we’ll get to test out more advertising options.

Tara: So your target audience that you’re targeting on Facebook. Are they specific disabilities that you’re targeting?

Dale: No, we have actually targeted all different disability groups, but we have found that we managed to get a lot of members with autism, and a huge number of members with various mental health disabilities and illnesses. With depression, anxiety, bipolar, all the various different forms. And one of the reasons we created the community was due to the bullying and trolling, harassment, whatever you want to call it, on particularly Facebook and Twitter of people with disabilities. Being, they’ve come to our community and finding it a much more safer and respectful place.

Liam: That’s really interesting to me, the approach you’ve taken with disability and kind of taking a, ‘we’ll take anybody’. And I don’t mean that in a crass kind of way. Because I helped start a group just in my local church for fathers of children with special needs and we, too, took that agnostic, almost, approach of, we’ll let the fathers define what the special need is. We have some dads whose children have Down Syndrome, we have some who– kind of a whole range of issues. And many are on the autism spectrum. But taking that approach of, we don’t try to describe what a disability or a special need is, we let you come in and tell us. That’s been a great way for us to welcome people and to let people know that they are welcome and that we’re not trying to pigeonhole and/or say, “It’s our way or the highway.” It’s, “Come be a part of the community.” And it sounds like– and I may be overreaching here, you tell me, Dale:, sounds like you’ve taken a very similar approach. From what you were saying, based on your membership numbers, it sounds like that that’s really working out for you in the community.

Dale: Yes, definitely. That is the approach we’ve taken. Yeah, you can disclose your disability if you wish publicly or to us, but you don’t have to do either because we open the membership up to friends and family members, and supporters as well. As long as you abide by the rules of being respectful and tolerant to people about disability issues, that’s our key theme of the community. One thing I’ve discovered, too, I really like Twitter for myself for being informed, to read news. And I follow lots of people back in the WordPress community, and one thing I found since about 15 months ago when we started the community and I started tweeting about disability issues, is that a lot of the developers that I follow and respect turn out to either be on the autism spectrum, or have mental health issues. Once they knew that I was either disabled myself or involved with the disability community, they reached out and told me about their situations.

Liam: Yeah, that’s something that we certainly hear about on our little show here and certainly in WordCamps. We had very much, you just don’t know until people put their hand up or until they step forward in some way.

Dale: Yeah, because I think one of the good things in the WordPress community is it’s been very quick to embrace remote working, which is effectively what we do ourselves. We run our business from home and we’ve got a VA staff member who’s in India. And because of that flexibility around both hours of work and location, it is really well suited to people with disabilities. Yeah, and the WordPress community does seem very welcoming of people with disabilities. There is a great team of people dealing with accessibility, the core WordPress software has taken accessibility very seriously. Particularly, Ghost, the SEO plugin that everyone would know about. He does a lot of good work with accessibility and even writes blog posts about how to do accessibility in your plugins far better.

Liam: Yeah, I have to say that as an anecdotal observation, the Europeans caught on to and latched onto accessibility much, much sooner than we Americans did. I spent some time in the UK and that tech community and wider culture as well was embracing accessibility from a web perspective much, much sooner than The US ever did. I’d agree with you that the WordPress community as a whole is now, within the last few years anyway, really latched on to accessibility and taking it into core not just in a technical sense but really to the core of, we are going to democratize publishing. Then there’s a significant portion of the world that needs a software made in a way that enables them to engage.

Dale: Yeah. And I think the Europeans– I went to France and Italy about three years ago for the second time, and I’m hoping– because I’m hoping to get back this year if I have time, but the only thing the Europeans did worse, thankfully, not in the WordPress community, so many of their websites back then, I’d say that 90% used Flash, and Flash is just completely inaccessible. So force people using screen readers like myself. I was very pleased to hear in the last six months that Adobe has given a timeline for Flash dying off the internet. In many ways, thanks to Apple who has led a lot of accessibility things because it doesn’t support Flash on all the iOS devices. As the world has come to use lots of Apple products, developers have realized they’ve had to leave Flash behind.

Tara: Yeah. Using a screen reader, how do you find your web experience has changed over the years, talking about incorporating accessibility into websites becoming more and more accepted or more and more done? Is that something that’s really apparent to you or do you still find it to be challenging on the majority of sites you visit?

Dale: When the internet first started out, because it really was a text-based medium back then, due to speed of your connection to the internet. It was very accessible. In the last five year, I’ve found it went through a period of not being as accessible as lots of developer would use interactive elements that use Javascript to create special menus and controls on web pages that weren’t using standard HTML elements. It has become better but websites that you use or create custom controls inaccessible with screen readers– the screen reader, I’m using JAWS which is now the primary one– can work with all standard HTML controls. But if you– for example, lots of plugins use this sort of fancy toggle switch to turn options on and off. That is essentially a graphic and you click on the left-hand side for on and right-hand side for off. Unfortunately, that completely doesn’t work with screen readers. Many plugin developers I’ve spoken to, thankfully, have swapped over back to using a standard radio, not checkboxes, which is accessible. Yeah, these people starting to take more advantage of some fancy features which can cause accessibility problems. Then there is the prevalence over the last several years of the greatest difficulty for accessibility yet, so-called Captchas, where you have to try and identify those graphical things. Google, in the last six months, has brought out what it calls the invisible Captcha, and there is a WordPress plugin to implement it. It’s completely different to their standard Captcha and it uses different ways of detecting whether you’re a robot or a standard human. That is a lot better because you don’t have to actually do a challenge unless it thinks you’re a robot, then it gives you a standard graphical challenge. Captchas sites need to think about different ways rather than using them because I really do block the websites. Even occasionally when I get my wife’s help to fill them out, she can get them wrong several times because that is so difficult.

Tara: Yeah, I find even the– Google has the one where you have to pick all the photographs that have a car in them or something and I get all nervous because I think, “Wait a minute, maybe I’m missing it.” It’s very stressful even when you don’t have disabilities, I can imagine it’s got to be very off-putting, make the experience less enjoyable.

Dale: And there are plugins out there where you use– it is a premium plugin, a site called Simple Comments. There are other services out there that can do spam protection without using a graphical Captcha. And yeah, I’ve encouraged developers to look into those different options throughout the news and graphical Captchas.

Tara: Interesting. I want to transition and kind of go back to your background a little bit. What you’re doing is really interesting and I’m excited to hear where it goes forward. Going backward, you have a background as a lawyer, is that right?

Dale: Yes, I worked as a lawyer for about six years doing a lot of mainly litigious work, criminal, family law predominantly. That was in Australia, in both Tanzania and Western Australia.

Tara: Moving from that to, now, I assume that since you talked about this being your full-time gig, that you’re self-employed?

Dale: Yes, that’s correct. In fact, my first venture onto the internet was when I ran in conjunction with my ex-partner, a tourist accommodation, bed and breakfast properties for seven years. That was when we first did marketing on the internet and created websites and things using the old software back then such as HotDog, Dreamweaver, and other screen engines that were way more difficult to use than WordPress.

Tara: Interesting. You’ve had your hand in a few different things. One of the things that we ask our guests to talk about is success. Knowing that you have this range of experience and where you are in your life right now, how do you define success, Dale? What do you think success means to you?

Dale: Success to me means the ability to have a more free lifestyle, while at the same time learning enough in account to be comfortable. And not to have to go to an office from nine to five or nine to eight, happens a lot these days. And just be tied down to a desk. I absolutely hate working in those office blocks that have all those shared cubicles where you’re just next to another worker. I did that for several years and it’s just so destroying. You have no freedom, everyone can hear each other, you just can’t do anything. Yeah, I just hate those environments. And I’ve done lot of studying them, that is terrible. Certainly, I like a freer lifestyle where you can choose to go to the beach during the day for an hour or two and then come home and work later at night time and things. Two years ago, we actually spent two months in Bali and worked out of a villa we rented there. Because, yeah, then we could go for a swim each day in our private pool and get work done the rest of the time.

Liam: Now you’re just showing up. [laughter]

Tara: I like that version of success. Isn’t that like the happiest place on earth? Are people there the happiest or am I mixing that up?

Dale: Yeah, the locals were very happy. Everyone we met was really friendly and nice. The same in Thailand when I went there. As you mentioned about Europe, quite a few of the premium plugins that I use are actually developed by French or European programmers. Yeah, they are very strong into the WordPress community in France and Europe, generally.

Tara: Yeah, that’s interesting. When you put all of this together in your daily life now, what is the most important thing that you do every day towards that success or towards that flexibility that you like to have?

Dale: Really now probably is marketing the business, getting involved in the community we’ve created to get the members engaged. I’ve found that social media is very beneficial. As I said earlier, we have one sponsor from a large disability service provider in Australia. We met each other on LinkedIn. Some other customers and great developers I’ve met on Twitter. Social media is not all time wasting, it can be used very effectively to develop relationships. I do get a lot of news and relationship building done on social media.

Liam: Dale:, let me ask you. You talked about spending your full professional time when you’re not in Bali on a beach working on My Disability Matter, a community that you’re facilitating its growth and its connectivity. Can you talk to us a little bit about the business model that you’re exploring there in growing? You said you were in start-up mode. Would love to hear what you’re trying to do to grow that because that membership site is a challenge anywhere and I wonder how it’s going and what you’re doing and what your vision is.

Dale: Yes, we’re looking at several different income models. We have two sides of the Mydisabilitymatters.news. Site is the one where we publish articles, curate news from the disability sector, and there’s an email newsletter there to let people know about updates to the site. That is using a very traditional income model of either sponsored blog posts, banner ads, trying out Google AdSense, specialist help, advertising networks. It develops a lot more traffic but we know that takes time. That really is going to be a stick to those more traditional income models. Whereas the other site, the community mydisabilitymatters.club is going to very shortly, in the next few days hopefully, release a premium membership alongside the free basic membership, which will offer some upgraded benefits in the community. A shopping discount program in Australia. And we know of options to expand that to UK and US as we get more members in those areas. Then we will have business membership, because at the moment, we’re exploring, it remains to be seen whether it works, of course, charging business members an annual monthly fee to participate in the community, rather than the track that Facebook’s gone down of now, charging for every little tiny bit of engagement on the platform, be it either paid ads or boosted posts or whatever. Then we are also having banner ads and AdSense in the community, and we have gotten email notifications going out to members with all sorts of things and labeled some affiliate links in the newsletters as well. At the moment, we have really been concentrating on building out the free members to get the community engaged and then, as we’re heading closer to sort of 5000 members, we’ll start doing some marketing to businesses, once we can place for them to benefit from.

Tara: Yeah. I’m curious about using– we talked about PeepSo a little bit but mentioning Facebook. I know in the communities that I’ve looked at building for a couple of clients, in deciding between what platform to use, they often end up going to Facebook because people around Facebook anyway, and they don’t want to login to another platform. But I wonder with your subject matter and with your audience if Facebook is a place where they like to be or if they feel more secure and private maybe, and so they don’t mind logging onto another platform for your community. Talk about that a little bit?

Dale: Yes, I wasn’t sure how it’s going to work in the beginning but we have found Facebook ads, which means we’ve enticed people away from the platforms be very successful. We’ve been running between a cost in Australian Dollars, between about 60 cents and a dollar per signed up member through Facebooks ads at the moment. We thought that’s been very good. We obviously had to keep improving that with our conversion rates, but get people because people with disabilities have quite a few problems on Facebook, whether if it’s through trolling and harassment or Facebook has a lot of accessibility problems for, particularly, vision-impaired people. I find their website just impossible to use. They have an accessibility team but their website is so cluttered, they’ve done so many updates on the page and just knowing whatever’s happening where on the page, it’s very difficult. Yeah, we have had relatively easy to get people to sign up to the community. Then it is a matter of taking them through an email onboarding process to try and get them involved and engaged in the community.

Tara: Right, that’s interesting. Do you track how many people log in to your site and engage in your site?

Dale: One of the things that we do need to do develop soon. We’ve got Google Analytics, of course, which gives you some quite good statistics, but the one problem that PeepSo, and I’ve mentioned lots of other software these days, uses Ajax calls a lot for updating information on the page. And Google Analytics, although it can be made to work with Ajax site changes, it doesn’t by default. At the moment, we are missing out on a lot of tracking as to how much engagement there is because a Google Analytics, MonsterInsights plugin that was formerly with YOAST we used, then added records page impressions rather than all the Ajax activity that people like in post or writing a reply or that sorts of things. As we get some more income, hopefully, we’ll have to develop a better statistics package.

Liam: Yeah, data is hugely valuable. Especially, when you’re trying to grow a membership community. And there’s only so many times you can survey them, right, and just be able and great to say– look back at the first six months and say, “Here’s what’s going on and here’s what they’re clicking on. Here’s the conversations that matter rather than having to do it as a survey.”

Dale: That’s right. I have spoken to the developers of MonsterInsights and they tell me that a developer could relatively easily write an add-on to make it work with Ajax. And they had actually looked at developing a free add-on but they said that Ajax is implemented differently on nearly every piece of software so they’ve just haven’t been able to find a solution to that yet. We all have to wait until we can get the PeepSo developers to produce add-on specific to their software. The other thing I was just thinking, going back to you asking about the income models. The one problem with BuddyPress that we’ve found was advertising and managing to get ads inserted into the community. PeepSo has taken the approach of trying to build up and insert different revenue models into he software from the very beginning. There’s a WordPress plugin suite out there called Advanced Ads which has a fantastic developer, and PeepSo has integrated that into their software so that we can actually do in-stream ads just like on Facebook. We can target people on their profile fields and all that. You know, reduced version of what Facebook does without all the intelligence behind it. Of course, it does allow way more selective advertising and building it into the stream and all those options unavailable in BuddyPress.

Liam: That’s really interesting. On the chance that there’s people listening who haven’t heard of PeepSo. It really is an alternative to BuddyPress. It’s its own standalone entity, its own plugin and it connects with WordPress. Dale, I’m going to change gears on you and ask you what I’ll call our signature question. What is the single most valuable piece of advice, personal, professional, or combination that you have received and implemented in your life?

Dale: Yes, it’s not specific to business but it certainly applies to business as well, even a result I’ve got today, is to basically just know what you can achieve, or what someone can do for you, or what you can make your website do, or whether someone will date you or marry you if you don’t ask. Don’t be scared to actually ask for help, ask for something to get done, ask for a fiver or some sponsorship assistance. Really, yes, don’t be backward and come forward. Even this morning, I’ve just secured a sponsorship deal in a membership training program, Community RoundTable. I asked if they’d be prepared to sponsor our community by giving Jo and I free memberships, and they were. Yes, if you don’t ask, whether it being your personal life or in business, you’ll just never know what is possible.

Liam: Yeah, I love that. They’re never going to say yes, if you don’t ask.

Dale: That’s right. Back in my younger days, I had a lot of knockbacks with dating but I had some few successes just because you ask. [laughs]

Liam: Yeah, just putting it out there. I love that. I wonder how that’s worked outside of business, outside of dating. Maybe around personal development or other aspects of life that we haven’t really gotten into. How’s that bit of advice proven true in a value for you?

Dale: Yes, I suppose that attitude of trying something could be distilled down to – has been really good. I traveled to France, Italy, UK, Ireland, Asia. Going and experiencing how the cultures and other, food, meeting people, discovering history has been fantastic. If you just stay at home and never explore then, yes, you don’t learn anywhere near as much.

Tara: It’s great that you were able to travel and experience all those things and that you’re not kept at home. I would say, when you think about the word ‘disability’, I don’t know, I’ve heard some people that have issues with that word and so I think hearing that you’re approaching your life without the view that you have a disability in that way and it’s holding you back from anything is inspiring.

Dale: Yeah. And as you said earlier on, Europe, in particular, is very disability-focused, disability-supportive. I’ve had great success at different monuments or historic sites with getting access right up. When I went to, for example, Stonehenge, for the first time, it was 18 years ago now. Back then, you could actually get right up and touch the stones right then, everything, whereas, you can’t now. But even at the Louvre in Paris that I went to four years ago, they actually have a special section for vision-impaired people where they created replicas of some of the statues and different exhibitions that they have so you can touch them and go right up to them without having to damage the originals.

Tara: That is wonderful. Oh my gosh, that’s really impressive. That’s a long way that they’ve come. That’s awesome.

Dale: Yeah, even– it was 15-20 years ago at the British Science Museum, I got to explore a lot of all the taxidermied animals and different things they had on display, the dinosaurs. They were very approachable and friendly about letting you get right up close and touch things. Even in Europe, it’s certainly not the same with Australia but we take it with much appreciation. It’s all of the big monuments, the Pope’s Palace, the Colosseum in Rome, we turn up and I’ve got my white cane that I use in Europe because quarantine’s too much of a hassle with my guide dog. The moment that the people in charge spot you as a person with a disability, they came and grabbed us and take us in for free and jump the queue.

Tara: That’s great to hear.

Dale: Yeah, a few benefits. Europe really does provide some great accessibility – I was reading a a little while ago – even the gondolas in Venice have wheelchair accessible options now. I wasn’t quite sure how it works for the video but yeah, I’ve read of people doing it very successfully.

Tara: Excellent. I guess that makes traveling all the more enjoyable for you, that you can enjoy at that level and have some people that acknowledge you and allow you to experience the tourist attractions as much as you can. That’s great.

Dale: Yeah. One thing, obviously, outside our chat today that probably seven, six years ago I became very familiar with the frequent flier points options and how to use them to best advantage. There is a whole other world out there where I have traveled in business and first class for the same price as economy or less.

Tara: Good for you. I love that approach of asking and knowing how to make the most of things. I think that’s great. I’ve learned a lot from you today, Dale:, so it’s really been great having you on the show. We’re about out of time so I’d like it if you would share with our audience where they can find you online and on social media?

Dale: Yes. We have, as I mentioned, two main websites, Mydisabilitymatters.news and Mydisabilitymatters.club. The news sites and the community. Our corporate headquarters with all the information and maybe have had some different things is at Mydisabilitymatters.com. And on social media, my personal Twitter is @dalereardon. Our business Twitter account is @audisability, which is up to 26,500 followers just proving the popularity of disability issues online. Yeah, I can forward you the LinkedIn and Facebook so that you can add them as well.

Tara: We certainly will. Thanks for sharing all of that, thanks for sharing your story and for doing what you’re doing for the community. Really appreciate it, Dale.

Dale: Yes, thank you very much. I have found the WordPress community great to deal with and it’s terrific to be involved with.

Liam: Dale, we’re all better for you being involved. Dale, it’s been an absolute pleasure spending time with you, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tara: Thanks, Dale. Bye-bye.

Dale: Goodbye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Twitter Mentions

@dalereardon