There are a lot of talented WordPress developers out there. Many of them know more and charge less than I do. (My opinion is that their fees are too low, but they didn’t consult me about their pricing.) So why hire me to build your WordPress site?
First, because my consulting background gives me a broader perspective than someone who has never done anything but coding. I understand that your website exists to serve your business (or hobby).
Second, because my previous career in teaching means that not only am I accustomed to helping people develop new skills, I don’t despise them for not sharing my abilities or interests. I assume my clients are smart people.
Third, because my position as organizer of the East Bay WordPress Meetup means that not only do I breathe and sleep all the latest developments with WordPress, I know dozens of other experts in the local community. If there’s a job that isn’t right for me, chances are very good I can connect you with the best person to do the work. I’m also in a great position to subcontract people for special tasks like search engine optimization and graphic design. And I only hire U.S.-based subcontractors.
Fourth, because I’ve been a professional writer since before WordPress was invented, and I can write your website copy in addition to building the site.
Background
I’ve been online since 1985, when I was introduced to BITNET on the mainframe at Brown University. I started hand-coding HTML in 1994 in order to start producing a web version of my electronic journal, then published by FTP and Gopher. (Yes, those were the old days.)
As a classicist who saw the Internet as a means to an end, I never learned Flash, Java, or other web programming languages, but even through a brief period of retirement and a change of careers, I never quite managed to stop publishing material online. In January 2005 the e-zine I’d started in the summer of 2003 turned into a self-hosted Blogger blog.
Within six months of my initiation into blogging, I discovered WordPress, and never looked back. Within a few releases, WordPress had established itself as a versatile, easy-to-use content management system, the perfect tool for building personal and small-business websites that wouldn’t leave clients dependent on a web designer to change every comma—and wouldn’t leave web designers stuck doing tedious maintenance tasks instead of more interesting design and development work.
I began building WordPress sites for clients in 2007, and started to sleep and breathe WordPress in earnest in 2008. At the beginning of 2009 I joined the East Bay WordPress Meetup. (In 2010 I became the organizer, for my sins.)
“Fangirl” as a designation does not merely refer to my enthusiasm for WordPress, but describes my position as not quite either a designer or a developer, but rather someone well-versed in the WordPress software and developments in the WordPress world. I have been known to attend Joomla! events wearing WordPress logo tattoos.
