WordPress Consulting

“Consulting” is such a nice, broad term. But sometimes people do, in fact, want to consult someone about their website before having it designed and built. Perhaps you want to know more about the WordPress platform and whether it’s the right solution for you. (It might not be. You can do almost anything with WordPress, but there are some things that Drupal or Magento would probably do better. Unfortunately, you’ll have to hire someone else to develop those sites.)

I’m going to question your decisions. I’ll ask why you want a certain feature, and how it serves your business and your customers. I’ll tell you when what you want will be bad for your rankings in the search engines or make it hard for visitors to find their way around the site. I’ll also try to find less expensive alternatives to things you want but can’t afford when you’re on a tight budget. And I’ll bludgeon you with the need to take backups and upgrades and decent hosting seriously if you value your website.

I’ll also make sure you have every password you need from the beginning. I believe that the client owns the website and should never be hostage to a designer. (I also believe in getting deposits up front so that I don’t do thousands of dollars’ worth of work without getting paid for it.) One of the reasons I love WordPress is the way it empowers people who are not web designers to manage their own websites.

What I Actually Do

Mostly, I build people WordPress sites, sometimes with the assistance of colleagues who are specialists in disciplines like SEO and design. (All subcontractors are U.S.-based and paid a fair wage, usually the same thing they’d charge a client they were working with directly. I’m terrible at exploiting people.)  WordPress is a great choice for small business and personal websites, but you can also build social networking and e-commerce sites with it, and I’ve had some non-profit clients as well. Some of the sites in the portfolio started out as HTML sites, some were on a different content management system, some were the client’s first website, and some are re-designs of previous WordPress sites.

I like using the Genesis Theme Framework as a basis for building themes. I trust the team at StudioPress to create quality code and keep it up to date, and there are a lot of nice features built in to Genesis, like per-page layouts and search-engine friendliness. I’ve also developed child themes based on themes produced by Automattic (e.g. Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven): they’re quality themes with trustworthy coding, and they’re free. (Why child themes? Because your customizations don’t get overwritten when there’s an update to the original theme.) I find Woo Themes beautiful but quirky: the development team there seems to force WordPress to do things the Woo Way. Clients have found themselves beating their heads against things that should have been simple. Your mileage may vary, and if your heart is set on a Woo theme, I won’t discourage you from buying one. I’ll work with any theme that doesn’t contain malware or obfuscated code, but I’ll warn you if you’ve chosen a theme that won’t serve the purpose of your site very well.

I also troubleshoot existing WordPress sites. Cleaning up a hacked site isn’t my favorite thing to do, but I can do it. Sorting out problems with upgrades is usually easier. Or maybe you’ve realized that your webhosting company is really terrible at WordPress (not to mention any names—Earthlink, GoDaddy) and you need to relocate. Perhaps you started out with an HTML website and a WordPress blog (either .com or .org) and now you want to combine the two.

Or maybe you want some guidance in choosing and configuring WordPress plugins. With more than 16,000 of those available at the time I write this (October, 2011), finding the one you want can be intimidating, not to mention time-consuming. (The baffling array should diminish soon, as the WordPress foundation plans to remove any plugin that hasn’t been updated for a year from the repository. But that will still leave thousands.) I am not a plugin developer, but I can refer you to people who are.

I also offer WordPress training, to help you do a better job of managing your own website.