Katie Joll

I moved across the Pacific from New Zealand to Lake Tahoe, California, about 10 years ago.
There were a lot of stereotypes I was exposed to growing up that aren't true for the whole state.
From food portions to geography, everything seems larger in California than in the island country.
In 2012, I packed my trusty backpack and left my birthplace New Zealand, eventually settling down in California after a period of travel.
Almost 10 years later, I'm still here in Lake Tahoe, enjoying a life ce...

Have you been wondering what to do about your content marketing efforts lately?
If so, you’re not alone. Many businesses are grappling with which direction to take given the current global pandemic. Is it business as usual? Is it time for a new message?
Whatever your choice, you still have a story to tell and customers to help. Business is different right now for most, but underlying all of that, you still have an audience out there, and they have needs you may be able to meet.
What can you d...

What's the deal when you're an adult "of a certain age" learning to ski for the first time? Here's what to know before you go:

It’s never easy to carve out your own niche successfully, but that’s exactly what Dhiren Bhatia and the team at Cloudscape have done.
Its restaurant and retail productized service is the first of its kind, and is a popular choice among their clients. A key milestone has been to reach over $1 million in revenue. What do they do? The company helps businesses put the right cloud-based solutions in place, those that will bring the most benefits.
We spoke with Dhiren recently on our podcast and as...

Have you ever conducted an SEO audit on your website?
For many small businesses, SEO falls somewhere into the category of the almost-magical or woo-woo. It’s a mystical art and the two things you know for sure are that a) you need SEO and b) the “rules” always seem to be changing.
If you were to hire an SEO expert to conduct an audit of your site, you can often end up spending thousands of dollars on a multi-week exercise. Yep, SEO audits can be technical and time-consuming, especially if you...

As your business grows, there comes a time when you just have to get help. For many WordPress agencies, that means hiring a remote team.
It makes a lot of sense to hire remotely - you don’t have the overheads that you would for a co-located office and you immediately open up your pool of candidates to qualified people who don’t live near you.
Hiring a remote team can be both an exciting and daunting time. By sharing the workload, you open up your growth possibilities, however, sometimes it’s ...

Your WordPress business is ideally placed to operate as a productised service.
As Troy has highlighted previously, there are many potential elements in your business that you can turn into a product - meaning that you have something that you sell with clearly defined parameters. This differs from a “service” in that it cuts out many of the more taxing elements. For example, back and forth over what will be done.
This can be a little difficult to wrap your head around, especially if you have a...

“It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco.” —Oscar Wilde
San Francisco has inspired some of the world’s great minds for generations. It’s a city full of surprises and, yes, it is a place to disappear into, as my friend Jen and I discovered on a recent visit.
We’re small-town gals, but the lure of the big city caught us. The city that has captured poets, playwrights, songwriters, and authors loomed large in our minds as we arrived for a couple of days of uniq...

Local's tips for enjoying Lake Tahoe.

Explore Sonoma in the "hoof steps" of Jack London and take to heart his words; "the proper function of man is to live, not to exist."

Gather the girls for a weekend getaway of relaxation and local flavors
There’s nothing quite like a girls’ trip. The laughter, the camaraderie, the fun, and the sense of adventure and shared experience—to my friends and me, this is raising life to the highest pitch of enjoyment.
It’s not always easy to get away, between hectic work and home lives, but my besties and I decided a girls’ weekend was long overdue. Santa Rosa—the hub of Sonoma County wine country—was our agreed-upon destination du...

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear “Anaheim, California”? For most people, the “happiest place on Earth” is top-of-mind, and for good reason.

My husband Vic, daughter Bailey, and I were in Anaheim recently and spent a day at Disneyland® Park. We spun ourselves dizzy on the Astro Orbitor, found Nemo on a submarine voyage, and practiced our pirate voices on The Pirates of the Caribbean.

As we headed back to the car, bedecked in the classic Mickey Mouse ears, Bailey asked what we were doing the next day.

Disney has put Anaheim on the map for many families, but there is so much m

Having a smoothly managed cash flow is essential to keeping your business running successfully.
If you’ve decided to source product or sell in international markets, then you’ve got added layers of complexity to deal with when it comes to managing that cash flow. You might have suppliers in one country, buyers in several others, while you sit somewhere else entirely.
Many sellers have faced challenging scenarios, such as where cash flows get held up, supplies of new inventory then get held ba...

Redesigning your website is an exciting but often risky project. The temptation to start from scratch often leads to making decisions based on a lot of assumptions, and many underestimate the value of testing those assumptions.
To make educated, data-driven design decisions, testing some elements first might be a great way to start. In doing so, you might find that smaller changes over time will give you a better return.
There are actually cases to be made for both a radical redesign and incr...