How did you get involved with WordPress, and what brought you to it?

Funny you ask that… I fell into WordPress by accident and would not be here today but for a spur-of-the-moment decision to quit my old job. 

I’d been working for LexBlog, a Seattle-based company that built Movable Type blogs for law firms, since college and by mid-2010 I was their lead project manager. It was cool and a great learning environment, but I also eventually realized I wanted out of the web and to find myself work that had me building tangible things, using my hands, and interacting with people on a face-to-face basis.

That mindset lasted all of about three months. I spent a summer living like a beach bum on the Jersey Shore (no MTV jokes please), and by the end I was out of money and out of a home. A friend I’d gone to college with in Seattle was now living in New York. He invited me to a World Cup party at his boss’ house; the boss and I hit it off; and I was brought on as a contractor to help build a network of radio station websites…all built on WordPress, a platform that up until this point I’d never even looked at. It sounded fun and I was excited about getting involved in radio again, since it had always been a passion of mine.

I started the job on a Monday and by Wednesday had become familiar enough with WordPress that I felt comfortable explaining the basics to others. By the following week I was training employees at radio stations around the country on how to use it…and I’ve been working in the industry ever since. I joined Modern Tribe as a freelancer in 2011 and became a full-time employee — their first ever — starting May 1.

As Head of Quality & Support at Modern Tribe, what does the average day look like for you, and how do the pieces fit together?

The average day involves a lot of managing. When I started on the team, I was pretty much the entire support/QA crew. But as we’ve grown I’ve been able to build out a team under me, which means there’s less “in the weeds” work and a lot more answering questions from the support & QA teams; checking on whether we’re collectively on track to hit due dates; and generally making sure the community is “at peace.” By which I mean, none of our users are visibly agitated or risk turning against us because of some failure on our end. There’s a fair degree of marketing too: blog posts, user profiling and the like.

Ultimately I’m accountable for making sure we’re keeping people happy and keeping the development cycle going, releasing products that are as close to bug-free and under-budget as humanly possible.

Would you advocate for combining QA and support, and if so, where are other folks going wrong by keeping them distinct?

I don’t see any reason to keep QA and support separate. This could warrant an article in and of itself, but ultimately there is just too much that can go wrong by keeping what I call “pre-launch quality” (QA) and “post-launch quality” (support) in separate silos. Your support crew has the best feel for the pulse of the community: What users want, what they don’t care about, where their pain points are and where they’re struggling. An independent quality team might come to the table with a better understanding of what makes good QA, but really, with the right people that can be trained with  ease.

“But what if I’ve got enough budget that I can afford them both,” you might be asking? It doesn’t matter, I would say to you, and this is not a budgeting concern. It’s a matter of making sure the people who are dealing with the users on a daily basis have both an understanding of how the code works and a fluid knowledge of what’s changed or been fixed from release to release.

Let’s say I’m a support technician and I’ve got a forum post from a user complaining about a broken widget. If I’m not doing QA, I’d simply log that as a ticket and wait for word to come down from the devs/QA team that it was ready for release in an upcoming version. But I wouldn’t be able to answer questions on how specifically the new code works, or what it’s going to look like, or anything beyond “it’s fixed and should be released soon.” That’s a fail.

Imagine that same situation if the support technician were also responsible for seeing that ticket through to completion: Testing the finished code in a number of scenarios and themselves deciding that it was ready for release. Not only would they feel they had a stake in the matter, and knew they were the face of accountability to the user…they’d also be able to paint a comprehensive picture of the fix-in-question and how it played into the broader roadmap. 

Whether you believe it or not, users can pick up on when you’re bullshitting. They are far less likely to come away feeling positive about the experience or likely to recommend your solution to others, if they felt they just got played or treated like a fool.

You have a lot of experience in project management. What’s the most important factor of all in keeping a project on track?

It’ll sound like a cliché, but clear communication is hands down the big one. Everyone involved can be awesome at what they do, but if you aren’t communicating early & often, then at the very least you’re going to make life harder on yourselves until the project is done (and at worst could kill the project and cost you thousands of dollars along the way). That’s why I place such a high value on strong communication skills whenever I’m interviewing anyone for a project.

By clearly communicating deliverables so people know who is accountable and when, and meeting at least once a week for most projects to answer a few basic questions (What roadblocks are you facing? Who do you need a meeting with before you can proceed?), you can do wonders for your project.

From a communication point of view, how is managing the needs and problems of developers and the needs and problems of users most different, and most the same?

It can be a challenge at times. I’ve found — and this is obviously a broad generalization — that most “regular” users can be appeased easier than developers, only because there is usually a code snippet or workaround we can provide that more or less accomplishes their end goal. Developers usually want to get deep into the plugin and extend its use…usually in really awesome ways, but not always in ways that we can support.

That said, this too can be avoided by  strategically picking your team. I can say with certainty that I’m not a developer or even dev-minded; so there’s a limit to how much I can help a developer who comes through with a technical question. But I’ve offset that — and have given the developers in our user base a “friend” they can rely on in doing so — by keeping one or two “light devs” working the forums on a daily basis as well. These guys can hack at code and modify templates and generally know what they’re doing, enough that they can head off about two thirds of the dev-minded support threads that cross our plate. For the last third, we do make our core developers available to help as-needed on an ongoing basis.

What separates run-of-the-mill support from tell-all-your-friends support?

The enthusiasm with which it’s given. Look, the goal with support isn’t to solve every problem 100% of the time. That’s an unreasonable goal and you’re setting yourself up for failure if you approach support from this perspective. You’d bankrupt yourself, you’d take too long to respond to new threads and you wouldn’t get anything else done.

What’s important instead is understanding how you can let people down in a way that still leaves them feeling good and thanking you. Support is about showing people you care about them, and that you want them to succeed. You can show evidence of both without necessarily fixing their specific problem.

At the end of the day, it’s a matter of treating others as you want to be treated. Put yourself in the position of this user. I reread every single reply I write to a user before I post it, thinking with the mindset of, “How would I feel if I got this response?”. It may tack a bit of extra time onto your forum rounds, but man does it help leave a lasting impression.

If you’re already providing awesome support, how do you justify or “up-sell” hardcore users to premium support?

We actually don’t provide purely premium support. I know there are shops that do that, and it works for them, but to me that’s a slippery slope. I don’t believe one customer is worth more than another just because they’ve paid you some extra money…a CEO or CTO might think this way, but it’s dangerous for a support team to get in that mindset because it keeps you from providing the same level of awesome support to everyone.

Instead, in our case, we justify the upsell by including additional features in the premium build of our events calendar. Yes, the level of support we provide is generally deeper for these paying users than for non-paying users, but they’ve also got a bigger code base with more features and more considerations to work with. 

If you’re running a small or even one-man outfit, are there any hacks or preemptive strikes you can make to lessen the load in terms of time consuming one-on-one support? And more importantly, should you?

Great question. When I started doing support for Modern Tribe, I was pretty much a one-man outfit as you’ve described here. And as use of the plugin grew I found more and more of my time each day dominated by support. And I love support, naturally, but I’ll also be the first to tell you that if you spend all day focused on it, you’re going to get burned out quickly and that’s going to lower the quality of any help you provide going forward. 

There are both technologies and organizational systems that can help you here. On a more practical level, we recently started using HelpScout for our email support and as a time-saving tool it’s amazing. A small outfit can benefit from an organized email tool like this and the fact that it saves customer records and “stock” emails that still come across as extremely personalized. We’re now looking for a similar solution to use at our forums.

From a higher level, be strategic with what docs/tutorials/FAQs you prepare. If an issue comes up more than twice, it probably warrants documentation of some kind so that when it comes up again, you’ve got a link handy rather than having to reinvent the wheel. The amount of time this saves cannot be understated, and it actually kills two birds with one stone by showing prospective customers what an impressive, ever-growing body of resources you’ve made available.

What happens when support melts down and you have an irate user on your hands?

If you don’t look at each and every support meltdown as a learning experience that will help your team grow, you’re doing it wrong. In some ways irate users are a great problem to have: they force you to address a problem on-the-spot, rather than punt it down the road to a later date that never comes, and more importantly they give you an opportunity to see where you’re failing your users.

There are of course varying degrees of legitimacy to user meltdowns. Sometimes I’ll see one that I find laughably overdramatic or talking trash about a problem that doesn’t exist. But it’s still important to treat each of these people with the same level of respect you’d show your grandmother. Always remain polite. Even if the user is being rude…”kill them with kindness.” If nothing else they’ll feel bad about it once they’ve calmed down. 

Beyond that, a couple tricks I’ve employed that help with this:

• Don’t be afraid to escalate problems. Users get stoked when they see a support request that they perceived as being handled poorly escalated to the next level within the organization, and it usually calms them down just to have a new person to engage with.
• Offer refunds. Even if you have an official policy against it, consider the amount of time and money you’ve spent supporting this person already. Would it be easier to just give them a refund and recommend a competitor? If so, do it with a smile and move on.

One thing we won’t tolerate, though, is people being mean to the support staff. My skin is as thick as the next guy’s, but there’s a difference between getting angry about a problem and just being a jerk. This rarely happens…but when it does I have no problem firing a customer if they don’t treat my crew right. Nobody deserves to be treated unprofessionally when they’re just trying to do their job. And this is WordPress, not rocket science or planning a drone strike, so the stakes aren’t as high as some customers might have you believe.

As well as being Head of Quality and Support at Modern Tribe, you’re also a self-described “Burger Stooge.” Talk to us about the difference between working in digital space and *pun alert* meatspace, and how the two complement one another.

The reason I started working on the burger truck was because I needed that exact balance you describe here, between the digital space and “real life.” But there’s no question that the support experience for one complemented the other, and in each case I’ve learned a bunch of stuff I could take back and apply across the board.

A lot of those we’ve actually covered in this interview…service with a smile, the “golden rule” of treating others as you’d like to be treated, not being afraid to give a refund or remake that burger if the customer isn’t happy. All these things are equally important both offline and online, and it’s one of the reasons I get frustrated with businesses that feel they’re absolved of providing good support because they’re online providing a digital product.

Good service is good service. Period. Just because you aren’t taking to a customer face-to-face doesn’t mean they’re any less present. Online or offline, you’re an ambassador of the company you represent. Both your reputation and the company’s are at stake, so why not go that extra mile to do it right?

How did you first get involved with WordPress, and what brought it into your life?

So I had been dabbling with open source platforms in high school around 2006. Mostly WordPress, and a few others I can’t bear to mention. Although I didn’t really get involved with WordPress until early 2009, while studying Computer Science at Rutgers University, when I had taken an entry level programming job for an ad I found on Craigslist.

The job description wasn’t WordPress specific but mentioned open source solutions which was something I was interested in. Within a week of applying, I interviewed with Brad Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of WebDevStudios, and got the job as their first developer hire.

From that moment on my WordPress career was kicked into overdrive. At WebDevStudios, not only was I involved with building really cool things for clients with WordPress, I was releasing plugins on the WP.org plugin respository and heavily involved with the WP community both helping out with meetups in the area and attending various WordCamps. I actually attended seven WordCamps across the country from 2009 and 2010: Mid Atlantic ’09, Chicago ’09, New York ’09, Boston ’10, Miami ’10, San Francisco ’10, and New York ’10.

These first two years have definitely shaped who I am today. I learned a lot in a short period of time and made a lot of really good friends along the way.

You’ve worked as a developer with WebDevStudios and more recently (up to the present) as a Support Ninja at WooThemes. What did the one bring to the other, and how are they most different?

I actually wrote a blog post around this over at WP Realm titled What Makes a Great WordPress Support Specialist.

In the article I write about my previous experience as a developer and involvement in the WordPress community was a huge benefit to my transition into the support world:

“…having a technical background and general knowledge of WordPress coding standards and best practices is a HUGE win. This has really helped me. With a stronger background in WordPress development and involvement in the community, I’m able to not only provide knowledgeable answers but am confident that they are up to par with WordPress coding standards. In other words, done the right way.”

With that said, being strictly support I feel that I’ve fallen out of the loop a bit and am looking for ways to stay involved and keep my WordPress and coding skills fresh and up to date. That’s something I’d never want to let go and am currently involved with developing a few plugins and projects on the side.

At WooThemes you’re a Support Ninja. What interested you most about taking on the job, how have you made it your own, and what’s surprised you most about what it entails?

Short answer is that I’m passionate about helping people and love WordPress so it’s a perfect fit.

While working at WebDevStudios we had Support & Maintenance packages for clients which I also managed alongside client development. It wasn’t really the same thing as what I’m currently doing at WooThemes but I learned that I enjoyed helping users with WordPress and when I saw the opening at WooThemes I knew it was the job for me.

As of April 1, I’ve been at WooThemes officially for a year supporting our customers. I think that’s what surprises me the most. Not because I’d expect to be somewhere else but because I still love what I do.

Most people may view support as a boring, tedious, repetitive task but I’ve learned to really enjoy it. Each and every day has it’s new challenges and obstacles for me to take on. Not only am I solving problems and pointing people in the right direction, I’m also learning things on the way so it’s really a win win. Most of all, I strive to deliver happiness. Who doesn’t love that?

I actually gave a talk about this earlier this year at WordCamp Norway titled Help Yourself by Helping Others, which you can find on WordPress tv. If you can deliver happiness in every aspect of your support you’ll only benefit and this is something we try to do at WooThemes.

You work remotely for WooThemes from Norway. What tips would you give newbs to the whole work-from-home thing, and what do you wish you’d known when you first started working remotely?

My biggest advice to those who are new to working remotely would be to make a work schedule and try stick to it. If you aren’t strict to this you’ll easily find yourself working all the time so try to have a healthy work-life balance. This also ties into what I would have liked to have known when I first started working remotely. I’ve just started to find a nice balance.

Also, I definitely miss the social aspect of working in an office but yearly trips where you can meet your colleagues, like our annual WooTrip. Also, meetups and WordCamps in the WP community definitely make up for it. It’s definitely not for everyone but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not everyone can work from home, the local coffee shop, or even from an airplane which I’ve now done a few times. Incredible!

At what point does a WP outfit need a dedicated support person (or people), and what can bootstrappers just getting started do to make their support at least as good as it can be in the meantime?

Right away. Support is easily the most important aspect of your business, even if you are just starting out. You obviously need to have a product or service, but definitely don’t overlook support or throw it under the bus.

Again, don’t just do customer service or support, focus on serving happiness to your users/customers and you’ll be doing things right.

Conversely, where do you see people going wrong with customer service, and what are the consequences of that?

The biggest issue I see is people have a wrong view around support. I bet most people even cringe when they hear the word. Will you have horrible experiences and miserable clients? Of course, but let it go and focus on the users and customers who actually appreciate your help.

Here’s a quote from Mark Forrester, WooThemes co-founder, that really hits the nail on the head: “Customer support is the opportunity to convert a disgruntled customer into a loyal product evangelist by over-delivering and creating a memorable human connection with a digital brand.”

Remember, support isn’t a bad thing or a headache for your company. It should always be viewed as an opportunity to benefit.

You’re also the author of some awesome plugins. Which are you proudest of, and what itch were you trying to scratch with it?

I’m definitely most proud of CollabPress. A plugin I released in January of 2010 which, at the time, was BaseCamp on WordPress. There was a need for a project management plugin in the WP community and I decided to make something. We used it at WebDevStudios internally and a few others were as well. I think most successful plugins are those you can both use and benefit from yourself and release to the public as well. Open source, it’s a beautiful thing.

Although I can’t take all the credit. CollabPress 1.0 was a complete rewrite, once custom post types were introduced in WordPress, and Brad Williams, Boone, Eric Andrew Lewis and Christopher Cochran have put a lot of hard work into it as well.

Eric is actually the lead for v1.3, which released last week, and it’s a complete UI overhaul. I love the project and look forward to it’s bright future. You should definitely check it out.

Which three essential plugins would you recommend to WordPress designers and developers up against deadlines, but trying to ensure that their client’s site doesn’t get borked within a few weeks of installing them?

Tough question!

With WordPress being used for so many different types of sites even picking three plugins is difficult these days. Here’s three, you’ve definitely heard of and are most likely already using, I’d use on almost every setup:

1. Jetpack — While I usually turn most of the features I don’t need off, Jetpack has a few great tools out of the box like stats, short URLs, easy embed, etc. I love it.
2. W3 Total Cache — Site speed and performance optimization is a must these days. W3 Total Cache is a great caching tool for your WordPress site. Speed up those load times!
3. WordPress SEO — I’m not an SEO guy, never have been and probably never will be, but it’s important for the success of your site and WordPress SEO does a great job optimizing your site to best SEO practices with WordPress.

What would you say are the three most important skills or characteristics of a kick-ass world-level support person?

A kick-ass world-level WordPress support specialist needs to:

1. Not only passionate about WordPress but also involved in the community and loves to give back wherever he/she can.
2. Be a “people person”, i.e., friendly and easy to communicate with and who can help even the most un-grateful person with a smile.
3. Have some sort of technical background & skills whether it be HTML/CSS, JS, and/or PHP. Knowledge of WordPress coding standards and best practices is a HUGE win.

from http://wprealm.com/blog/what-makes-a-great-wordpress-support-specialist/.

Last up, how important has your involvement in the WordPress community been to you and your career so far? How would you convince someone up against deadlines that giving something back to the community is worth their time?

It’s been everything and still is. WordPress is truly an amazing platform, it’s the best. But, I don’t believe the success of WordPress is directly related to the product itself. It’s the community that separates it from the rest.

Just last week I had the privilege of organizing an online WordPress event called WordSesh. WordSesh was 24 hours of live WordPress presentations. It was fully free and it’s one and only purpose was to teach people about WordPress. It had over 34 speakers, from all over the world, and with events like WordSesh, meetups and WordCamps I’m really proud to be a part of a community that always comes together to better WordPress.

If you aren’t involved in the community already you are missing so much. For starters, you could regularly attend a local WordPress Meetup, go to a WordCamp. And if there aren’t any near you, you could even look into starting your own like I did here in Norway. The connections you’ll make and knowledge you’ll learn are priceless and well worth your time.

I would also make sure to check out make.wordpress.org to see how you can give back to WordPress. It’s not always easy to find time in our busy schedules to give back. I wish I had more time to, but every little bit helps and let’s continue to make WordPress the most popular tool on the internet.

Quick Overview

Whether you totally missed the free 24-hour-streamathon of WordSesh, or just want to catch up on the infinite payload of WordPress wisdom shared by its participants, you’ll be pleased to know that the whole thing has been captured on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Image based on Words by Alby Headrick, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you get started with web development, and when did WordPress enter the picture?

I got caught in the web before the first bubble in 1999 as a teenager in Montréal. My first exposure to code was Flash Actionscript 4.

That was soon forgotten and I started teaching myself C#. I built a simple CMS out of it, only to move to PHP thereafter. By mid 2000, I put the project manager’s hat. I gradually dropped coding and concentrated on organizing teams.

WordPress first came to me while I was in the Congo in 2005. I entertained my first blog on a platform built by a friend.

The “5 minute install” promise of WordPress piqued my curiosity. I was quickly sold and I knew that WordPress would be a game changer.

Tell us about Wysija and the problem you’re trying to solve with it.

Wysija is a newsletter plugin for WordPress that was first released in early 2012. It’s a freemium solution.

Me and my 3 partners in crime wanted to fill a gap: what newsletter solution can be more flexible than Subscribe2 or Feedburner’s email alerts and yet, not force users to leave WordPress.

There were 3 challenges:

• build an easy to use drag and drop editor
• make the installation easy
• keep it essentially free

What made you decide to build a product on top of WordPress, rather than as standalone software?

There are dozens of great standalones. Great, but users want an integrated solution within WordPress.

Once you’ve trained your friends, family or clients to use WordPress, you don’t want to teach them yet another third party application.

How did you arrive at the business model for Wysija, and what was the thinking behind it?

For some reason, I can’t imagine another model than freemium. Here’s why:

• I’m personally averse to buying Premium plugins myself, believe it or not.
• We need a lot of users to quickly to build a better product.
• The “competition” already use freemium models.

How do the challenges of supporting a product compare to those of dealing directly with clients, as a service provider?

I grew tired of answering phone calls from clients. Consider me relieved at having a product instead of a service.

Supporting a product is very intense nonetheless. Yet, it’s quintessential to our success and I regard it as our number one marketing tool. When you have a product, it’s OK to make some mistakes, but it’s fatal not to respond to your users.

What pitfalls do you think entrepreneurs and designer/developers might face when making the leap from service to product?

Good question. I get it all the time at WordCamps. Many developers are tempted, and yet afraid to make the leap.

Here’s my own unordered list:

• Committing to your product is a full time affair.
• Underestimating support, or disliking it.
• Working alone, because having a partner is tricky, will get you nowhere.
• It’s about the experience, not the features.
• Your users know what they want, they don’t always know what they need.
• Yes, you’ll be poor for a while. But you’ll be exhilarated and happy.
• Sell from day one, don’t wait.

What’s been your approach to branding, telling your story, and setting Wysija apart from the pack?

Your product needs to speak for itself. Build an experience and user interface that is easy and fun. Your users should feel they’re using something special.

As an author, you need to be reachable and transparent. Humans love to hear about other humans. When people write to you, or ask for help, they are friendlier when they’ve seen your photo. Go to WordCamps, and meet your users — it’s gratifying.

Then, it’s all about service. Provide fast and friendly support.

Your website has to look professional so your visitors know you’re serious about it.

Acquiring users is difficult. Try to make every single one of them loyal ambassadors of your product.

What do you look for in a plugin or WP-powered product you’re considering using, and what makes you run a mile?

I look for plugins that have, in this order:

• Regular updates.
• High number of downloads.
• Support reputation.
• Best compromise between features and user experience.

What part, if any, has the WordPress community played in your work and the success of your business?

The WordPress plugin repository is how people find us. More than Google, word of mouth, and sponsoring WordCamps combined.

I consider the repository as the most important community tool because it offers the support forums, the reviews and star ratings. More importantly, it’s not commercial.

Sponsoring WordCamps hasn’t given us a lot of traction, but we do it nonetheless.

Talking at WordCamps has a definite impact. Then again, the crowd is composed of enthusiasts and hardcores. An infinite group.

WordPress is used by the masses. They’re actually everywhere around you, in your daily life. They are unknowingly part of the movement. I’m thrilled when I stumble on someone who uses Wysija, yet knows absolutely nothing about it or WordPress. This is when I feel we’ve reached the core of the community.

What are the three most important things to keep in mind when supporting a premium product or service?

Premium or free, you should always support your users with this in mind:

• Answer within 48 hours, possibly 24 hours.
• Be courteous and friendly.
• Get to the bottom of the problem and fix it.
• Ask for a review when finished. See our reviews, as example.

Additional tip: ever noticed how girls always say they’re sorry when you tell them something bad happened?

They’re right! Say you’re sorry, even if you have nothing to do with the problem itself.

What are you proudest about Wysija, in terms of really distinguishing it from the other options available for creating and maintaining mailing lists?

Its simplicity. This said, you still need to be a geek to configure it. This is part of our ongoing battle to add features while keeping it simple.

I’ll leave the last words for a Matt Mullenweg quote:

“The goal is to reach simplicity and not to be simplistic.”

Quick Overview

If you’re interested in web design and development and want to expand your horizons across a range of sizzling hot topics, you’re probably going to want to plug your ears into the Boagworld Show. Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington of Headscape, alongside frequent guests, take on big subjects like analytics, best practices, and building sites for ROI, and all in their quintessentially British fashion.

Image based on Blue Marble 2002 by NASA Goddard Photo & Video, CC-BY-2.0.

It’s not every day that we find ourselves interviewing a philosophy major who went on to become a pro-football player before taking on WordPress and building a successful business around theme design. Tell us about your journey into WordPress.

WordPress started as a hobby for me. While I was playing football, we had a lot of free time in the offseason. I’d often find myself tinkering on the web. I stumbled across WordPress while looking for a better tool to build websites. After my football career was over I kept an active interest in WordPress and eventually started designing themes. If you want to read the whole backstory, check out “The last 3 years” over on The Theme Foundry blog.

Are there any similarities to or things you’ve learned from professional football that apply to your entirely different role as founder and head honcho of Theme Foundry?

I learned a lot about hard work and the importance of being a dependable teammate. Football is the quintessential team game. It requires you to do your job while trusting the other 10 players on the field with you to do the same. When everybody does their job well, the team is usually successful. I think this spills over into business as well, and it certainly has helped me while building The Theme Foundry team.

The theme Vigilance was a huge breakthrough for you. How did it come about, and what did you learn from the changes that followed in its wake?

Vigilance was my first foray into theme design and it was way back in 2008. The WordPress theme market was in the very early stages, and I think we just hit the right spot with Vigilance. It was minimal and clean, and had some pretty cool options for a free theme at that time.

The biggest lesson I learned from Vigilance was that customers are willing to pay real money when you provide them with value. Until that point it was more of a concept than a reality for me.

What commonalities do you see in your customers, in terms of their needs, frustrations, or objectives?

Most of our customers need a website and they’ve usually already decided to use WordPress. At the core everyone’s objectives are very similar — stake out my spot on the internet, easily manage my content, and make sure my website looks great and functions well. WordPress handles the first two and we focus on that last part.

You tell the story behind Theme Foundry, as well as those of your clients, on your site. How important do you think it is to have a story in a competitive marketplace, and where would you place that in the mix of other factors that set a WordPress business apart from the pack?

I think it’s extremely important to have a story. A story resonates with your audience in a way that a simple set of facts cannot. Human beings love stories, and for good reason. Stories have defined and embodied the human experience across all cultures for centuries. We’re at an exciting time in history as we now have the chance to bring those stories alive on the web as a shared experience using amazing tools like WordPress.

How important is documenting and supporting your work if you’re in the WordPress products and services industry, and where do some people go wrong with this? What have you learned over time about this process?

Extremely important. As a customer, knowing that the product I purchase is supported and will continue to be supported is a deciding factor in whether or not I buy that product.

Tell us about your design process. Has that changed a lot over the last few years or have you settled on a tried-and-true approach that works for you?

Design is about constantly evolving —- new tools, new methods, new ideas. There are so many talented and smart folks working hard on design problems and it’s great that many of them are happy to share those ideas with everyone.

My design process follows this pattern: sketch, rough mockups in Adobe Illustrator, design, and build in the browser. The first two steps only take about 5% of the total time I spend working on a theme or a design. This is also how we design themes at The Theme Foundry. This isn’t the traditional approach, because most folks either come from an agency background or are working in an agency. Therefore, they usually end up following a more rigid waterfall process that works well in that agency environment. They spend quite a bit of time on the mockup stage and then pass Photoshop files over to a front-end developer and say “code this.” Unfortunately, it’s never that easy. When you make the browser your canvas you can truly design around the medium itself and build a better website.

As a self-taught designer what do you think you were able to bring to the table that those trained specifically in one form of design or other might have overlooked?

I think my weakness as a designer can serve as a strength on the web. I don’t have great artistic abilities, but on the web artistic abilities aren’t valued in quite the same way as they are in the physical world. I think the web at its core is about publishing, so we should take inspiration from the centuries of work in that field. I think some of the best designers on the web have a background in print. Ultimately, I think being a great web designer requires a multidisciplinary skillset, which naturally lends itself to self-teaching.

You’ve created a range of beautiful and innovative themes that have often pushed the envelope. Which are you proudest of, and where do you see theme design evolving next?

I’m most proud of some of our latest themes — Avid, Portfolio, Watson. I think they represent the type of high quality work we want to continue to add to our collection at The Theme Foundry. I should also note, I didn’t personally design or build those themes. But, I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with the really talented folks that did design and build them.

When it comes to deciding on your next product, do you approach your decisions from a particular angle, such as serving new verticals or putting new WordPress core affordances into practice, or do you just let inspiration strike?

We have an internal process for deciding what theme to build next. Much of this revolves around gaps and areas we need to improve in our current collection. I still don’t think we’ve nailed down those core areas and filled out our collection completely.

Once we’ve focused on a scope it’s the designer’s job to come up with some sketches and inspiration for the direction of the theme.

What’s the one thing you wish you had known when you were first getting started with Theme Foundry?

Push the limits and don’t obsess over small problems. I have a somewhat obsessive personality, and I like things to be organized, scalable, and structured. While this has helped us in many ways it has also slowed us down in others. I’m just now starting to understand the importance of moving faster when the wind is at your back.

You have a background in industrial engineering. How did you get into working with WordPress, and have you found that your industrial engineering background has influenced your work with WordPress?

I’ve always been intrigued by the web, but I didn’t give any real consideration to building websites until I was in college at Auburn and thought I had a few good website ideas. They weren’t good ideas, but fortunately I managed to find WordPress in the process of figuring that out. I continued to be fascinated by how easy it was to create a basic website with WordPress, and for a while would periodically tinker with a new idea, but between 2008 and 2010 I was much more focused on my new engineering career.

I started blogging around mid-2010. I was hacking around with my personal website and of course coming up with new ideas. But this time around I realized that I enjoyed making websites more than I believed in any of my ideas for websites. I also realized just how much I liked to write. I got hooked on WordPress and web development in general and never looked back. I spent countless hours reading, tinkering, and blogging so I could learn more and more about WordPress.

Early on, I don’t know that my Industrial Engineering degree did too much to benefit my web endeavors. But now that I am a full-time programmer and consultant, I consistently see the benefits of my Industrial Engineer’s mindset and focus on core business goals in tasks that I perform. Plus, Apple CEO Tim Cook is an IE grad from Auburn, so I feel like that gives me some major street cred, right?

At what point did you realize that you could make a living with WordPress, rather than tinkering with it as a hobby?

By spring 2011, I knew that what I was doing wasn’t going to fulfill my career ambitions. I had found my professional passion, and I started thinking about how I could possibly work on the web full time. I knew little to nothing about professional web development or the WordPress economy, and I certainly didn’t know just how in-demand WordPress developers were.

I thought I was going to have to take an enormous leap of faith and leave a well-paying job with great benefits and become a freelancer. So I just kept building websites for family, friends, and fun to help prepare myself. And then in August 2011, I saw a tweet from one of the largest and oldest web development agencies in the state promoting a full-time position for a WordPress developer. I was shocked, and felt like I must at least send them an email, even though I still didn’t think I was quite “ready.” A week later, I had a job offer in hand from Infomedia to be their lead WordPress developer.

You recently launched Post Status. How do you pitch that to the unawares, and what inspired you to put it together?

I typically define Post Status as a “WordPress News & Links” blog, but really it’s just a short-form blog where I link to things I like while adding a bit of context to the conversation. Also, other people periodically submit posts that they find interesting. I’ve enabled up-voting on the site as a method for visitors to offer additional insight to other readers on whether the linked post is interesting or not.

I put it together simply because I wasn’t satisfied with existing methods for consuming WordPress-related information. I’ve always enjoyed Hacker News for broader tech news aggregation, but it’s still a bit impersonal and obviously not WordPress-centric. I also love the style of the Next Draft newsletter, as it’s a collection of the top ten news items every day, curated by Dave Pell. Dave’s own “voice” really shines in his newsletter, while simultaneously driving me toward the articles he links. My goal is for Post Status to be like a hybrid of the two.

Tell us a bit about the thinking behind how Post Status works, and how you set it up to be as democratic and user-focused as WordPress from the get-go.

I’ve seen a number of WordPress news sites come and go, for a variety of reasons. But most WordPress news comes by way of a blog post anyway, so re-writing longer-form blog posts as “news” is a bit silly in my opinion. So Post Status merely attempts to drive traffic to the source, and add context in as few words as possible to help readers discern whether they want to read the original article.

I rely heavily on user feedback, submissions, and validation (by voting) in order to make Post Status its best. In a perfect world, Post Status would be a go-to resource for anyone interested in WordPress. I want it to be part of people’s daily routine. And I can’t do that alone. If Post Status helps someone’s blog get more attention when they’ve written great content, and also offers a source of quality information to readers that they otherwise may not have found, then we all win.

By day you’re the lead WordPress developer at Infomedia. Can you think of a project you’re particularly proud of having worked on recently? What made it stand out for you?

One of my favorite sites we’ve done at Infomedia is Weld for Birmingham. Weld is a weekly paper in town that has done a great job of balancing print and online media. They have a small staff, but they also encourage community members to start their own blogs on Weld. I love how passionate they are about Birmingham and how focused they are on high quality local journalism.

From a technical perspective, we built a responsive parent theme using the Hybrid Core drop-in framework and a child theme for the blogs in their Multisite network. We’re using a custom post type and Posts 2 Posts so they can relate their online articles to their print issues. During the process of building this site, I discovered just how much advertising technology isn’t keeping up with responsive design.

My talented coworker, David Hickox, is responsible for the beautiful design. Weld is engaged with their online community and they love WordPress. They are a joy to partner with, and the project has been very rewarding personally.

How important has the WordPress community been in getting and keeping you involved with WordPress, and would you encourage others to get involved on some level?

My relationships with other members of the WordPress community are incredibly important to me. I wasn’t hired at Infomedia because I was a proven developer. They took a chance on me, because they were just getting into WordPress, and saw my commitment to staying engaged with the community. I learn every day from many people in the community, and cannot stress enough just how valuable my relationships are. WordPress has a very special community atmosphere, where even the most talented WordPress professionals in the world are approachable and helpful.

My wife jokes with me about my “internet friends,” and I always love when I get to turn an “internet friend” into an “in real life” friend at WordCamps and meetups.

You’ve written about pricing products and services on your blog before. What’s the most important thing that someone just getting started with their WordPress business should keep in mind about pricing, and what do you wish you’d known years ago that you know now?

Clients hire consultants for tasks they can’t handle themselves. Therefore, creative and technical aptitude is assumed from the get-go. Being a great programmer isn’t going to make a client an advocate. Excellent communication skills, complete honesty, and doing what you say you’ll do will make a client an advocate every time. We should price our work based on the value we provide to the client, but we also need to make sure the client will look back on the project as a positive experience as a whole. They will never see the value in our code if we don’t communicate properly and make good on our promises.

As far as more practical pricing tips from some people I really respect, the Code Poet ebook on pricing is exceptionally good. I promise I’m not just saying that because of this interview. Mark, Remkus, and Shane are all top notch members of the community, and it’s very nice of them to share their knowledge and experience.

I certainly wish I knew a few years ago just how in-demand WordPress developers were. When I first thought about making the jump, I didn’t know how many agencies were seeing the popularity of the platform and desperately trying to find talent. I could’ve started working full time with WordPress sooner than I did. You’ll never think you are “ready” as long as you are learning, because you’ll always see things you still don’t know. I tell aspiring developers to just go for it. Start sending emails to local (or remote) companies and give them an honest overview of your skill set. Someone will love to hire you, and then you can learn on the job.

How important would you say it is to provide documentation or training to clients, and what’s in it for the designer-developer itching to move onto the next project?

Unfortunately, building something doesn’t mean the user will automatically know how to use it. Documentation and/or training is pivotal. I talk a bit more about how to offer users help on WP Realm, but in addition to those methods, nothing beats real in-person training. I usually leave training sessions with more personal notes on things I can improve in the UI interface of a particular feature, just from watching them use it for the first time, than items the client requests.

As for what’s in it for the developer, nothing is worse than building a feature that goes unused. And if they don’t know how to use it, why would they?

Tell us about the Happy Theme you designed and shared with the community, and what you learned from the process of putting it together?

The Happy theme started as a project to design and develop a theme I’d release to the public. However, I simultaneously needed a new base theme for our Infomedia client sites. So, Happy hasn’t really become the finished theme I wanted it to be yet, because I focused on creating a base theme first.

On our client sites, we use a forked version of Happy that we’ve consistently iterated. We were in need of a flexible theme that we weren’t afraid to fork when the work necessitated it. Because it’s built on Hybrid Core, that’s easy. The framework lives in the “library” folder, but doesn’t assume anything about the theme markup or specific features. Therefore, we can build most sites as a child theme, but if we need to fork the parent, it’s no problem.

Before long, I’ll finish up the Happy theme the way I initially imagined it, with all the goodness and flexibility of our Infomedia base theme. Then I’ll finally submit it to the repository. In the meantime, patches are welcome!

The biggest thing I’ve learned in theme development so far is that thinking through a theme architecture only goes so far. Nothing beats putting it to the test in the real world to see how both users and other developers will use it. My teammates at Infomedia make for a great test group!

Which three things would you underline as essential to anyone wanting to carve their own place in the competitive WordPress design and development world?

1. Never stop learning. New trends and techniques are always emerging. I often finish a project and immediately want to go back and change something based on a new technique I learned. Read blogs, books, and follow industry folks on Twitter to stay up to date.

2. Blog. We build things for other people every day using WordPress. We need to eat our own dogfood and use WordPress ourselves. I’ve learned so much by blogging consistently, both about how to use WordPress efficiently and just by writing about topics I want to learn about. Also, blogging has helped me get my name out in the community more than anything else I’ve done.

3. Be nice. There are enough inconsiderate people in the world. Follow the golden rule. Treat others how you would want to be treated, whether they are a client, a colleague, or a random person you encounter on the internet. This isn’t always easy, and I often fail, but if we all made a conscious effort to be nice to one another in our daily interactions, the world would be a better place.

Quick Overview
In this recently released video from An Event Apart, Jason Santa Maria, who needs no introduction around these parts, talks about his own experience of learning to say “no” as his design career progressed. If you’ve ever taken on a job out of desperation or optimism, only to be bitten in the proverbial butt, you’re going to want to hear what he has to say.

Image based on “No!” by mslavick, CC-BY-2.0.

Quick Overview
Some folks say that charging clients by time spent is no way to prosper because your time is finite. Sell a product, they say: it’s the sure-fire way to afternoons spent poolside, supping on caviar and sipping champagne like the idle rich. Respected WordPress consultant Bill Erickson says that by minimizing the aspects of your service business that don’t scale, you can maximize productive time and profit.

Image based on “In the workshop” by Les Chatfield, CC-BY-2.0

How did you get started in web design and development? When did Anatta Design come into the picture?

I kicked off web design work with my first company called Dharmaboost. It did well but we were all over the place doing .net, Rails, and even Flash projects (yes, we say that with a lot of sarcasm). The motivation to start Anatta Design came from the longing to own and operate a business on my own schedule; with a team that gelled, doing projects we loved, and with no starting capital. Just three years later and Anatta Design had really taken off. We were born into a niche within web design and development. A niche where the sole focus was to improve everyday user experience problems with design and technology.

Was Anatta Design always a WordPress-focused shop or did you come around to using it later on? What made you decide to use it over some of the other options available to you?

Since it’s inception, Anatta Design has been a 100% WordPress-focused shop. We wanted to work and sell technology on the platform we use everyday. A platform that was simple, scalable, and just a delightful experience. One strong belief that we share with WordPress is a passion for great user experience. So choosing to use WordPress wasn’t really a decision. It just perfectly aligned with us and our company mission. So we ran with it and never looked back.

What type of clients do you typically deal with and what challenges do they most often pose?

Our clients fall into two buckets: high end design firms (with 15+ designers) or online-only web businesses (generating at least $250K yearly). For us, these are absolutely perfect clients. They understand the nature of running an online business, they understand development cycles, they get what’s worth spending time on, and they aim for results backed by analytics. The challenges these clients often pose are what we enjoy: usability challenges. A typical problem might be where some part of their site or a feature isn’t getting the results they want and all the solutions they’ve tried haven’t worked. In this situation, they come to us to develop a complete custom solution that requires both design and development power. These types of challenges take planning, strategy, and execution. They’re hard challenges, but super fun because it’s what we love doing—helping clients achieve what their business needs and deserves.

Do you think there are benefits to being a specialist within a field of generalists, or is it more important to be flexible with what you’re able to offer clients? How has your approach worked in Anatta Design’s favor?

There are benefits to being a specialist. As a specialist you earn the ability to dictate what works and what doesn’t backed by experience + tested results. Like being the go-to team when there is a specific challenge that no one else has been able to crack. Or having the foresight to visualize an objective solution from afar and dive into executing it. You don’t have to be flexible to make clients happy. Clients come to us because they’d rather have us be real and flex our expertise to build something that gives results than cater to everything they think they want. Flexibility gets confused with caring when it shouldn’t. We’re approachable, frank, and care for our clients, but we won’t put our mouth where our strengths aren’t.

Tell us about a big project you enjoyed or a recent success story Anatta Design has experienced.

Our biggest project would definitely be the launch of our first plugin to the WordPress repository, WP Readable. We came up with the idea, strategized it, designed it, and had it out the door, all in three months flat. We followed it up with two updates within just a month’s time. The need for such a plug-in simply arose from our personal experiences with mobile blog viewing. We found that the interaction was not fun, the design was always cluttered with functionality, and the user experience was always focused on page visits vs. reading the blog. We changed that and brought the focus back to the experience of reading and filtering through posts. It’s the first mobile plugin that lets you navigate from post to post via a touch slide/swipe interaction, effectively transforming mobile blog viewing on iPhones and Androids. What’s really exciting is the response this release has generated. It’s humbling to see mentor companies like Digital Telepathy (creators of Slideck and Slidedeck2), multi-million dollar health and wellness companies like Clean Program, and big online marketing giant Retargeter, hopping on our user lists and fueling us with some really positive feedback.

What would you say have been the biggest changes in how you run Anatta Design between now and when you first got started?

The biggest change has been moving from an entirely service-based company to a product development company. And as a result, having the opportunity to live out our company focus which is to improve user experience problems with design and technology. This is hands down the biggest and the most gradual change since we started Anatta Design. This transition from service industry to product industry is huge. Previously all our timelines and motivation were driven by our clients who had their own agendas. When a milestone or launch was completed for them, we were done. But not anymore. Now everything is driven by our customers and our core team. And we’re never done until we’re 100% satisfied with the service we give to our customers. In this scenario, we want to keep giving and keep pushing harder in projects we believe in. It’s fun and makes work satisfying for each one of us.

Tell us about your approach to branding Anatta Design. One of the things that really stands out about your site is the core narrative and imagery you use when describing your company, in words, images, and even video. Do think it’s important to stand for something as a company out there on the web, and if so, what does Anatta Design stand for?

We’ve always been focussed on telling the true story of our team and what we really care about. It’s never been about a single person or getting a single sale. It’s been about communicating our passion and our purpose for being a company. Our company solves complex web problems through simplicity. And the more complex the challenge, the simpler our solution. So to answer your question, I think it’s essential to take a stand in the web space, especially at a time when there’s so much going around. We have the same tenacity and solid effort behind our products and solutions, that the WordPress core team has behind every WP release. The end-user is our number one focus and we can fulfill that aim because we’re always true to ourselves.

Which go-to plugins save you time and headaches when you’re developing client sites? Or do you prefer to build from scratch?

We created our own starter theme back in 2009. But now we’ve switched to Automattic’s underscores theme as our starter theme  because it’s awesome. We’re always open to using another’s theme if it provides the core components we need for our client’s project. We care deeply about site load time and code cleanliness, though we’re not fanatical about doing everything perfect at first go. We do things that get the job done and then relentlessly refactor. This way the clients are happy and we are too.  And we adopt this approach in our product development too: get it out there and get iterating. We love the plugins below simply because they make everything we do so much quicker:

• Developer ensures we have all the tools we need.
• Debug Bar gives us a fast way to find PHP warnings and notices and debugging.
• Core Control is great for letting us see how Core works and how we can plug into the system.
• W3 Total Cache takes care of everything we would have done manually for front-end speed optimization.
• WordPress SEO takes care of everything SEO-related.
• Gravity Forms works out of the box and is very extendable.
• Slidedeck 2 is the perfect content slider solution.

Where would you like Anatta Design to be in five years’ time?

I hope that it’s not very different from what it is right now, though with much deeper experience in the product sphere. We’ve only just engaged in the world of product development and we would love to become a driving force in the WordPress plugin world. Having a few products in the top 100 WordPress plugin market would be a great achievement. But at the end of the day, our real test is to see how our products influence the user experience. In five years, it would be great to see our products being used to solve real challenges.

Which one piece of hard-won advice would you give to someone just starting up their first WordPress shop?

Learn WordPress to the very core and understand how and why it was constructed the way it is. Only when you do that, can you understand how to build amazing, high-end, scalable websites with it. WordPress is a super powerful system and it’s only when you break away from its architecture and design will you run into problems. Stick with it, and it will stick with you.