Continuing our series of interviews with industry personalities, we are today speaking with Raitis Sevelis from Visual Composer.

Raitis has been in the industry for over 10 years, currently working as Head of Product at Visual Composer (and Indystack).

They are the creators of the original WordPress page builder plugin, WPBakery, and have now relaunched a completely new experience under the Visual Composer brand. In this Spotlight – we’ll dive into his background, what Visual Composer are focused on at the moment and more.

Raitis, in his own words:

Hi, everyone! My name is Raitis Sevelis and I work at Visual Composer, WPBakery, and Indystack. Sounds like a lot of things to handle! Indeed, my days can be pretty busy, navigating around products and meetings. 

Other than that, I really try to be active in the WordPress community for two main reasons.

First, I love the people of WordPress and enjoy my time in the community.

Second, with 10+ years of experience, I feel there is something I can give back and help others. I run a Facebook group WordPress for Business for people that run businesses around WordPress.

Being an active community member also gives me an opportunity to stay informed about all the things that happen around WordPress and connect with great people like Vito Peleg (CEO at Atarim), Aleksandar Savkovic (actually my teammate at Indystack), Davinder Singh Kainth (The WP weekly), Anne-Mieke Bovelett (accessibility expert and organizer of WordCamp Europe), and many others.

My personal life is very much similar to my career. I enjoy different things that may sound very opposite and hard to combine under one roof.

I have always felt passionate about design, this is why I started my UI/UX career in the first place.

At the same time, I enjoy boxing. To be honest, I haven’t done it in a while with plans to return there. Right now, most of my free time goes into doing homework with my kid.

Of course, traveling and cooking are on my list.

I enjoy WordCamps a lot since they combine traveling and meeting WordPress people. I consider myself blessed when it comes to my job.

For the food, I love to cook and also try new food. Being very picky during my childhood I came to the point where I try anything that comes to my plate. My philosophy is that if other people eat it there should be something about it. This is how spiders, scorpions, and even live worms got on my plate. I can’t say I liked it all but I know how it tastes not from the stories.

Ok, let’s jump back into my career and WordPress, otherwise, we can get stuck with listing my exotic menu 🙂

I started as a UI/UX designer and ran a small digital agency serving local clients.

The transition to WordPress for me looks natural – going from an agency to a product made for agencies. I knew exactly what we were missing.

I joined WPBakery and got familiar with WordPress on the same day. Back then, WPBakery was known as Visual Composer Page Builder. We started off with the very first live frontend editor and down to many more cool features, like loop builder.

As you may know, WPBakery is used by around 13% of all WordPress sites which makes it hard to implement groundbreaking changes just like that. This is how we got to what we now know as Visual Composer Website Builder.

As years passed and new technologies became available, we decided that WordPress needs a next-generation builder that is purely React-based and goes beyond the content area. This is how Visual Composer Website Builder was born.

People often think that building a product is the hardest part. I believe that we proved everyone wrong.

For us, branding became the biggest challenge. We wanted to keep the Visual Composer brand for the new product so we renamed what was known as Visual Composer to WPBakery. Sounds complicated and it is, but this is something that you understand once the damage is done. Fighting with confusion is still our biggest battle to win!

Other than that, Visual Composer has become the product to meet the expectations of developers and agencies across the world.

A modern tech stack combined with agency-grade tools, like presets, global templates, theme builder, and role manager allows agencies to deliver fully functional sites to their clients while configuring what clients can and can not do. I think that this can be described as our main advantage since we all have plenty of stories where content management goes wrong – with Visual Composer it is possible to reduce such risks.

In fact, I believe that the balance between flexibility and simplicity is the main challenge for WordPress and any products related to the WordPress ecosystem.

As a professional, you are always looking for flexible and advanced solutions to help you do your job better. When it comes to regular users, they want simple solutions and not to get exposed to all kinds of features.

At this point, we’re getting closer to our latest improvement – a partnership between Visual Composer and Atarim.

Most web agencies find it difficult to integrate change management into their workflow, especially if we have clients involved in the process. Our latest integration addresses this problem by making change management and collaboration a part of your web development process.

With the roadmap for 2023 focused on improving workflow for web agencies, our partnership with Atarim is a large step in making Visual Composer even more suitable for working on clients’ projects.

Talking about the future, there are more things coming from our camp. On February 2023, we made Indystack available for the public to address another need of web agencies.

And when I say “available” – I mean it.

Web developers and agencies have full access to enterprise-grade managed WordPress hosting completely free of charge. You pay only when you go live or transfer (deliver) the website to a client.

There are more things to share and I can talk for hours about products and WordPress but we can leave that for an in-person meeting at WordCamp Europe, where Indystack is a proud sponsor of the event!

Or, you can always find me online on Facebook, including communities – Indystack, Visual Composer, WPBakery, and WordPress for Business. Of course, LinkedIn and Twitter are on my list but expect a delay since I am less active on these platforms.

We have exciting partnership news again this week – this time for web developers and agencies looking to streamline their workflow and improve overall project completion times.

Atarim has joined forces with Visual Composer!

This means we’re delivering to web agencies an unrivalled partnership between the leading visual collaboration platform and the ultimate visual website builder.

So exactly what does this mean? Why have we brought you this new partnership and how will it impact your workflow & efficiency? What makes it so cool we’re bursting at the seams to launch it?

Let’s take a closer look and see why this is extremely exciting news for everyone!

Visual Composer – Building Better Websites… Better!

We’ve long been fans of Visual Composer, and not just because we felt their pain facing up to the challenge of morphing from one brand to another! At Atarim, we grew and changed from WPFeedback to the brand you know today, and Visual Composer has similarly grown from its roots with WPBakery.

And like us, Visual Composer’s journey has been dramatic, and perhaps also inevitable.

Whereas WPBakery was the very foundation for early visual page building, bringing drag-and-drop functionality to WordPress, Visual Composer takes this many steps further. It provides the ability to not just build and edit the content of a single page, but to build and develop an entire website in a visual way – focussing on developing the actual content, rather than spending time on backend configuration.

This has represented a seismic shift for developers – virtually doing away with the need for constantly switching between the backend and the frontend, and allowing for a much more streamlined approach to site development and editing.

With Visual Composer it’s possible to design and develop far more than just the visual content of a page. It provides the ability to edit and create entire page templates, footers, headers, sidebars, pop ups, and every aspect of the themes used.

What we also love about Visual Composer is the focus on developing sites that are fast, efficient, and highly optimized.

This is largely down to their Visual Composer Hub – a resource library of elements, templates and addons, all stored in the cloud. All you need to do is choose the ones you want to use, and add to your website only the assets you actually need or want.

This ensures lightning fast site speeds, and a massive increase in overall efficiency.

Not to mention the greater ease as far as on-going maintenance and security is concerned.

For anyone familiar with WPBakery, this is all very different indeed!

Whereas WPBakery installed libraries of addons and templates by default, and made significant use of shortcodes (which are rapidly being deprecated), Visual Composer is built from the ground up to deliver efficiency.

Written in React, and taking advantage of the very latest developments and ways of working with WordPress, this is a tool that’s helping developers and agencies significantly improve project and task timelines – which of course, in turn, is improving that rather nice number on the bottom line…

So How Does Partnering With Atarim Make A Difference?

You may have already noticed that several words we’ve used to describe the benefits of Visual Composer are also words often used to describe Atarim: visual, efficiency, speed, streamlined approach, turnaround times…

We appreciated the similarities in their intent and realized the huge advantage that could be offered to agencies and developers through a partnership.

With any other site builder it’s still necessary to switch regularly between frontend and backend. With Atarim’s visual tools allowing clients to simply ‘point and click’ on elements of their site they want updating, web agencies are able to see exactly what needs changing, and where.

Thanks to this exciting partnership you can instead work almost exclusively within the frontend of a site, seeing both the current tasks and the web page at the same time.

This allows developers to see the complete list of pending tasks on the left, each of which links directly to the page/page element on the right.

There is no need for any additional clicking, navigating to pages, or diving in and out of the backend or admin dashboard. 

Instead, each task created by Atarim appears as an item that brings up the actual page on the right, with all of the page editing tools and abilities right there, ready to be used.

Atarim & Visual Composer – The Ultimate Project Workflow!

Just imagine how this workflow can significantly improve your team’s efficiency:

• The client points & clicks an area of their website and types a note to say what they want changed.

• This immediately creates a task within Atarim that’s assigned to the appropriate team member, and includes all of the necessary data (such as a screenshot of how the client saw the page element, their note, the browser they used, and their screen resolution).
  
• Your team opens up Visual Composer and sees a panel on the left with all of the current tasks (and all of the data collected by Atarim).
  
• Clicking on any of these tasks opens up the relevant page & section on the right hand side of the same window.
  
• As this is the actual page, editable directly within Visual Composer, and with all of the block tools and functions available right on the page, the developer can immediately make the necessary changes – with no clicking away, opening up additional pages, navigating through the backend or admin dashboard.

In other words… it just works.

Here at Atarim we continue to be committed to developing the most seamless, efficient, and enjoyable workflow possible for you, your clients, and your team. Partnership with incredible companies like Visual Composer helps to make this possible.

Check out the Visual Composer announcement here.

Atarim and Visual Composer – how web agencies are supposed to work.
If you’re not already familiar with the groundbreaking way in which Atarim has revolutionized the way web agencies communicate with their clients and improve project workflow and timelines, then test Atarim out today with a Free Forever plan.

Find out more about Visual Composer, and Atarim’s collaboration tools. 

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Atarim has long had a reputation across the design agency industry for helping to cut project completion times by up to 80% with its groundbreaking visual collaboration tools. Test out Atarim free today with the Free Forever plan.

Today’s partnership announcement highlights the importance Atarim assigns to providing agencies with the best combination of tools possible. With a large number of integrations already possible through Atarim, such as Convesio, Visual Composer, Zapier, Rocket.net, Zendesk, Basecamp, Slack, and many more, you can find out more about Atarim’s integrations here.

If you’ve been around Atarim for a while, you’ll know we’ve built some fantastic partnerships with wonderful businesses and products that complement Atarim well.

These include our deep partnerships with MainWP and Rocket.net, which you can read more about in the linked blog posts, and of course we also offer a range of useful integrations with popular products like Slack, Jira and Teamwork, as well as tools like Zapier and Pably.

But recently we’ve been able to change the way that we approach our partnership planning, and that means something pretty exciting…

Firstly, our capability to develop integrations between Atarim and other products has increased tenfold as we have both grown our dev team and gained valuable experience – we can now build and test integrations significantly more quickly than in the past.

Secondly, and excuse our lack of modesty here, we have seen something of a sizeable leap in popularity as we’ve built up the Atarim reputation and user base!

But What Does This Mean?

Thanks to the functionality & reliability of our app and WordPress plugin, and the reputation Atarim and our Founders have in the Agency and WordPress spaces, we currently have more than a dozen fantastic companies quite literally queueing up to partner with us and develop deep integrations…

Yep, sometimes we need to pinch ourselves!

These partnerships are going to bring significant productivity benefits to both our users and those of our partners, so we’ve decided to release them as quickly as possible.

It’s like getting presents at Christmas – no-one wants to wait until New Years to open the second half of their sack!

Therefore we can confirm that, beginning this week, we will have an unprecedented period of product announcements coming up, where we’ll be announcing new partnerships at a rate that might just blow your mind…

Let’s do this!

Partners for Optimization & Added Value

Whilst acknowledging this increase in the speed with which we can launch new partnerships, it’s important to note that we aren’t interested in vanity arrangements – simply sharing mutual links and glowing reviews to our followers. This has no value for the users of either product and, frankly, we don’t see the point.

Atarim is all about helping agencies and teams optimize their workflows and facilitate improved client & team collaboration, so any partnerships or product integrations must reflect those objectives.

When holding discussions with potential partners we are looking at whether we can deliver genuinely useful user functionality, as well as ensuring that we develop a diverse range of integrations that each contribute something different.

With that in mind, we are thrilled to announce that over the next few weeks we will be unveiling not one, not two, but THREE exciting new partnerships that we know our users will use and love!

(and we have several more already lined up for after the Web Agency Summit too – watch this space…)

New Atarim Partners, Spring 2023

I’m not going to share any spoilers – there will be information about each integration coming with the launch announcements – but since we’re feeling so excited about what’s coming up, here are 3 little clues…

1. One integration is all about bringing collaboration to where you work...

2. Another is perfectly aligned with our mission to optimize and speed up workflows to give WordPress users the ability to save hours in their day…

3. One partnership will offer high performing WordPress sites the smoothest possible experience & easiest scalability, allowing 100% focus on business growth and success...

That’s all you’re getting right now!

(But we’d love to see some guesses over in the Atarim Facebook Community! And we promise that you don’t have long to wait until we unveil the first announcement…)

Back in 2020, as we all went into lockdown and live events were cancelled around the world, most of us sheltered in place and gorged ourselves on a steady diet of doom scrolling, bread making and Tiger King.

As WordCamp Asia 2020 was cancelled just days before it was due to open, throwing off all his carefully laid plans, our Founder and CEO Vito Peleg could tell our industry was scared – and he needed to do something.

Within a week he’d not only mapped out his idea for an online summit for the web agency and WordPress worlds, but he’d built the virtual platform to hold it on and started to find Sponsors and Speakers to help him make it happen.

The Web Agency Summit was born, and has run successfully each year since – growing in size and popularity even as the impacts of covid receded and live events tentatively restarted.

Following the 2022 event we spoke to attendees, as well as our Speakers, Sponsors and Media Partners, and they were unanimous – even in a post-covid world, the Web Agency Summit has a huge part to play in bringing together agency owners and WordPress users with industry experts, businesses in the space, and the very best teachers. The networking opportunities were also seen as hugely beneficial.

And so…the Web Agency Summit is back!

SIGN UP FOR FREE NOW

A Festival Atmosphere & Everyone Welcome

You might notice that this year, the Summit has had a lick of paint!

We decided to shake things up a bit, and so in 2023 – and since our Co-Founder is a former rockstar after all – the Summit is all about building a festival atmosphere.

One of the most wonderful things about music festivals – particularly those that share our bright, colourful vibe – is that everyone is welcome.

Festivals are inspirational melting pot of fans, music acts and even businesses, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, locations and walks of life.

In stark comparison to the conflict seen across the world right now, for the most part, despite bringing huge numbers of people together in one place, festivals pass without aggression or aggravation.

This really speaks to us, and aligns perfectly with what we believe the Summit stands for:

Everyone is welcome.

Diversity and inclusion matter to us as a company and as individuals – and not as part of some corporate ‘tickbox’ exercise. It’s actually something that you can even see demonstrated by the racial and religious diversity of the Atarim team.

What brings us together at Atarim is a common cause. A genuine passion to make communication and collaboration easier, faster and smoother for agency owners, freelancers & teams across the world.

When it comes to the Summit, what we all want – from the organisers to the attendees, the speakers to the sponsors, the attendees to the media partners – is for as many people as possible to come together during the 4 day event duration to teach and inspire, to reach out and connect, and to learn and discover.

Annnd we can have a whole lot of fun while doing so!

Sounds like a festival to us 🙂

Opportunities for Speakers, Sponsors and Media Partners

Interested in speaking at this years event? You can submit your idea for a talk, panel or interview here – we will close submissions 14 days before the Summit begins, to ensure everyone has time to prepare.

If you have any questions about the submission process, our Head of Inbound Marketing Caroline Crossland is coordinating the speakers this year and can be reached at caroline@atarim.io.

A business looking to support your industry and reach new customers? We have a sponsorship opportunity for you! With packages tailored for all types of business and sizes of budget, we’re sure there’s something ideal for your company – take a look at our available options here.

If you’d like to reach out to discuss, you can email Vito at vito@atarim.io.

Are you a media outlet who can help amplify the message of this event – an online Festival of Learning, Discovery & Connection in the Agency & WordPress Spaces? We would love to work with you!

We are super passionate about reaching new attendees this year, and making sure everyone knows they can join this leading event for no cost whatsoever – even though they could learn all they need to know to grow their business, from the experts who’ve been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt.

Our Community Manager Disha Pegu is coordinating our Media Partners and can be reached at disha@atarim.io.

I Want It All! | The Backstage Pass

As always, the Web Agency Summit is FREE to attend.

With a free ticket, attendees can watch every single live session as it happens, as well as access replays for up to 24 hours after each session ends.

They can access the Festival Village, where our Sponsors will mingle with attendees, showcase their products and run exclusive competitions, as well as avail themselves of networking opportunities in the VIP Tent.

If, however, as an attendee you want to really dial things up a notch and access a HUGE bundle of value-packed content to help you build the business of your dreams, you might want to consider the Backstage Pass.

Benefits include:

• Anytime On Demand Access to All Summit Content: Not just from 2023, but the full catalogue of sessions, panels and interviews from the 3 previous summits too
• Access to the Atarim Academy and the exclusive Masterclass series: Here you have available to you a HUGE resource of amazing content from industry leader Vito Peleg and other amazing experts in their fields – essentially everything you need to learn to build the business of your dreams
• An Amazing Bundle of Exclusive Content: Including fantastically useful wireframes for leading pagebuilders, to help give you a jump forward and save time and money in your agency business
• …and so much more!

For full details of all that is included with the Backstage Pass, and how to access the Earlybird pricing exclusive to those who have registered to attend the Summit, SIGN UP FREE and you’ll be given all the details on the confirmation page 🙂

 

Here at Atarim, you know that we’re all about making the working lives of our users – including agency owners, teams and enterprise organisations – easier, more productive, and more profitable.

We make collaboration and communication between you and your clients, and between your own team members, significantly easier, removing bottlenecks and simplifying workflows.

So as we continue to build out our platform into a full suite of tools for you to manage your web design work, we are now thrilled to announce that Version 3.6 is NOW LIVE, and includes a couple of really exciting updates built to further optimize your workflow – plus all the usual refinements and bug fixes.

First up, prepare to meet the BIG ONE – we have launched the beta of our Automations feature!

Automate, Automate, Automate…

Atarim already makes taking actions like changing task priority or assigning tasks to team members super quick and easy – but what’s quicker than quick? Having it happen automatically of course!

With the new Automations feature you can set up custom workflows with IF and THEN actions.

For example: IF a comment is added to a task that is marked Complete, THEN change the task status to Open.

Game changer!!

We have huge plans for this feature, and we know it’s something our users are super excited about. Automations will streamline and optimize workflows even further than our collaboration features already do.

Take a look, have a play and see what you think! What do you think we should add to this feature in our next update? How are you going to use it? Let us know on Twitter or in our active Facebook Community.

More Powerful Annotations

Yep, we already launched annotations, and it was good. It was useful.

But we’ve now taken it up a notch, introduced additional functionality and made it much smoother to use. It’s now a much more powerful tool to further encourage visual collaboration and really highlight certain feedback requests/comments.

Basically, we made it awesome.

The icon is now more prominently displayed too, so you won’t miss it, and there’s other changes that make image annotations a truly useful feature.

The Need for Speed: Caching on URL-based projects

If Atarim is all about one thing, it’s collaboration. If it’s about two things, it’s about collaboration and speed. With the Atarim platform you can massively decrease the amount of time eaten up in your workflow by difficult, messy and time-consuming communication.

When more than one person is involved, we can speed up the whole web design process by a colossal amount – up to 80% – by ensuring client or team collaboration is simple, easy and fast, resulting in huge productivity – and profitability – gains.

So you won’t be surprised to hear that our latest obsession is SPEED. Our developers are beavering away in the background working on the very foundation of our platform doing everything they can to make your experience with Atarim as speedy as possible – with this latest update shaving seconds off the time it takes to load your sites. When you first add a website via URL, we now cache this in the back-end – meaning the next time you load it, it will be almost instant.

You can then re-scrape the website with the refresh button (bottom left) if you need to update the website inside the iframe.

We know these aren’t the sexy updates to talk about, bursting with new features and functionality, but they are important, and make your whole experience with our tools as smooth and speedy as possible.

Version 3.6 Changelog

Dashboard New

• Automations (Beta) – You can now setup custom flows inside your Atarim Dashboard inbox with if/then. For example, you can create a flow here if a comment is added inside a task that is complete, change the tasks’ status to open.
  
• Caching on URL-Based Projects – Before this update, when you loaded a website inside the Dashboard (whether it’s brand new or added previously), we would scrape the website every single time. Now, once added we scrape the site and store it inside our DB, meaning loading that site afterwards is super fast.
  
• Image Annotations – You can now take a screenshot of your current view and annotate it with shapes and text to give you even more tools to make things super clear to your team and clients.
  
• Graphic FeedBack Ver 2 – We’ve made significant improvements to the graphic feedback tool inside your Atarim Dashboard, including more options for hotspots and some changes to approving designs.

Dashboard Bug Fixes

• Auto-login – Previously there were some issues with automatic login on some WordPress sites, this is now fixed.
  
• Pagination on Time Entries – If there were loads of time entries, it could take a while for them to load, we’ve added pagination to stop this from happening.
  
• Export Button – Previously, the export button didn’t work sometimes, this is now fixed.
  
• Missing Thumbnails – On Design Projects inside the Dashboard, thumbnails sometimes would not load, this is now fixed.
  
• Jira Setting – When turning on Jira settings sometimes it would not save, this is now fixed.
  
• First File Upload – When uploading a file to a task, the name was not showing correctly, this is now fixed.
  
• Arrows on Pop-Over – The arrow was not showing on pop-overs that are horizontal, this is now fixed.
  
• Saving Edited Comments – Saving edited comments were not working on URL based projects, this has now been fixed.

WordPress Plugin Bug Fixes

• Main file name – We have changed the main file name as per the WordPress standard.
  
• Updraft conflict – Fixed a JS conflict with the Updraft plugin.
  
• Loading Icon – Moved the loading icon to local storage to prevent a CORS error.