Quick Overview

Let’s face it, it can get lonely sitting in your code bunker hammering out sites into the small hours. Sometimes it’d be nice to hang out at a regular watercooler and catch up on what’s new. Only a watercooler where everyone talks about WordPress, rather than what happened on TV last night, or whether the section manager is ever going to discover a more powerful anti-perspirant. With WPwatercooler’s video podcast goodness, you can sit in on regular WordPress roundtable discussions without ever leaving your seat. Watch it live, watch it after the fact, but, seriously, watch it already.

Image based on Water Cooler by IdleFormat, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get started with web design and development? Is it something you expected to find yourself doing a few years ago?

I graduated in architecture and after a few years struggling in the interior design field, I decided to change areas. Back at that time, it was 2000, web design seemed to be a promising career, so I took the chance and studied a postgraduate course in Hypermedia Design. At the same time I started working at a web agency and I’ve been working as a web designer ever since.

It’s not something I expected to find myself doing a few years ago — it’s been almost 12 years I’ve been doing this I mean, it’s been a long time! But before 2000, definitely not, my dream was to work with animation.

As an illustrator and graphic designer, do you think that you bring things you’ve learned or experimented with in those disciplines over to your work with WordPress or are they distinctly separate?

I think web design owes a lot to graphic design, therefore any work with WordPress does too, but I believe it’s a different discipline. I’d rather compare web design to architecture than to graphic design, mainly because of the relationship between architects and engineers versus designers and programmers. To design a website it’s really important to understand how it’s built, the possibilities, what can be done or not. I know that in graphic design you need to have an understanding of the printing process, colors, type of papers etc., but it’s not so much dependant on the technology behind it. About illustration, it’s something I’d like to bring more often to my designs, I don’t explore the possibilities that much, however what I’ve learned about colors and composition with illustration are reflected on my work, yes.

When did you first start working with WordPress, and what made you choose it over the other options available?

I started working with WordPress in 2007. A few years earlier I did a website for a traditional Catholic Festival in my native town, as a volunteer. It’s annual and they desperately needed to renew their website, but they had no money to pay for it. The programmer who worked with me before had disappeared and I didn’t know anyone else who would do the job as a volunteer. So I searched the internet for a solution where I could do the job all by myself and at the same time give the festival organizers the freedom to update and run their site independently. I was looking for a solution which respected web standards and that was free. When I found WordPress I thought it was fantastic, I didn’t know anything about PHP, MySQL, I didn’t know to write a line of code, but I just didn’t need to! There was great documentation and almost all of my doubts were already answered in the forums. I could do everything on my own. The other options I tried were Plone, but there was too much to learn, and Mambo (there was no Joomla yet) which generated terrible HTML. So there wasn’t a better choice than WordPress!

Tell us about a WordPress project you’ve worked on recently that made you proud. What did you enjoy and find most challenging about it?

We’ve just launched a redesign project called Catraca Livre. I did the design, HTML, and CSS. It’s a calendar for free or low cost events. It’s becoming very popular and it gets between fifty and a hundred-thousand visitors every day. Their Facebook page has been liked almost 1,500,000 times so far, too. Catraca Livre was one of Hacklab’s first clients — their website has been running on WordPress since the beginning of 2008. As it grew, its interface needed an upgrade to address mobile devices and the code needed improvements to deal with the growing audience. Besides, it needed a better search mechanism so the users could find events easier.

What I enjoyed the most was the fact the client liked the idea of a very colourful site and they gave me a lot of freedom to work as I chose. I really love bright colours and on this job I got to play with them.

The two most chalenging parts of the job from a front-end point of view were making it responsive while at the same time fitting the client’s dynamic workflow. Its homepage has a very flexible layout and its system lets its administrators choose from a set of three different types of rows of features: With one, two or three categories. Inside each row, they can choose from many different combinations of layout grids. It wasn’t easy to make it responsive, mainly because it depends on some editorial policies too.

The client’s workflow is crazy and from the beginning of the project they changed their main categories countless times. Because of this, it was difficult to make a perfect main menu. Sometimes it was best to make it horizontal, sometimes vertical. We launched it horizontal, but I believe we’ll need to rethink it soon.

From the development point of view, the most challenging part was to integrate a search server based on Solr. It allows users to find events near them by a geographical search, or filter the events by a variety of parameters. And all of this at an incredible speed.

What hard-won advice would you give to someone just starting out in life as a designer?

I read this article by Nathan Peretic at A List Apart and I couldn’t agree more with it. It’s about writing a proposal, but there’s a lot of good advice in it that I heavily recommend anyone starting out in this career to read. My favorite quote is this one:

Why should you be selected for this project? Because you’re the cheapest? The quickest? Because you promise to do more than the other guys? Maybe. Sometimes those are the reasons, but they’re also the levers you least want to rely on pulling. Website design and development are services and not, on the professional level, commodities. Providing a commodity is an exhausting, unsatisfying, deadening experience. Doing what you love, on the other hand, working as an equal partner with smart, respectful clients is invigorating.

Do you have a typical client or a particular niche you work with, or do you find that you’re working on all kinds of different projects in a given year? Would you change anything about that?

At Hacklab we like to position ourselves as a business with social concern; we believe in Free Software and we like to publish our solutions whenever we can. We also like to work with innovative projects. So though we’ve worked with different types of clients, most of them have a little bit of those values. What I’d change about it is that I’d like to work just for clients who shared those values.

Tell us about your work in the Brazilian WordPress community, and how that’s infleunced your professional or personal life?

I started the community in 2008 with Anderson Clayton, a guy from Rio de Janeiro. In the begining it consumed a lot of my time! I did a lot of everything, I translated WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress, plugins, ran the website, moderated the forums, organized WordCamp, meetups. I had help, but I was on the front of all these activities. As I worked as a freelancer, I had plenty of time for that, but because of WordPress, more work came in and I started working with the guys at Hacklab.

So in 2010/2011 I had to let it go a little, and it was good because other people came in and started helping me out with the translations, etc. In 2012 I came back, mostly helping organize the two WordCamps we had, in Curitiba and São Paulo.

The influence on my professional and personal life was huge; since I had the idea of translating WordPress I haven’t stopped working, and what’s best, I’ve received some sort of recognition I didn’t have before. This interview, being featured in Matt’s State of the Word talk last WordCamp SF, and participating at the Community Summit are a great honor to me. I’ve met many interesting people, I’ve made great professional contacts, I’ve made good friends. There’s a feeling of fulfilment that is the best part, which is to know that with a relatively small effort I’ve helped many people and I’m part of this great thing that is WordPress .

What can people do to get involved with localization, submitting patches, or otherwise improving WordPress, and why should they bother?

There are many channels available. I think the best way is to go to any of the make blogs and see what’s up. But if people don’t think they have the time, they should at least adopt the pratice of sharing their WordPress knowledge and experience by publishing their code under GPL. They should bother because WordPress belongs to them, they should own it and make it better everyday. Knowledge is something we should cherish and share so everyone is able to profit with it, not only a small group. That’s why WordPress is great.

Quick Overview

Need beautiful, HiDPI icons for your next site? Not wild about the idea of eating in your client’s (limited… again) budget? Enter Genericons: beautiful, free, hi-res icons to suit all of your needs!

Image based on Martyrs ceramic icon by Melissa Bridgman, CC-BY-2.0.

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 first get into WordPress, and (presumably later) BuddyPress, and what was it that pulled you in?

Like many, I went the hand rolled route to start blogging. It was somewhat of a “rite of passage” to develop your own. I was lucky enough to be a member of the blogging network 9rules back then. This was an amazing collection of people focusing on creating great content. A few others in this community were using WordPress when it was still a fledgling platform. I took a bit of time to be convinced I could do what I wanted to do theme-wise — but once I worked that out, the simplicity sold me.

BuddyPress was a slightly different story. I was creating WordPress themes and had a chance to create some BuddyPress themes. I had time to dive into what then was quite a learning curve to create themes. Over time as I learned that communities was where my heart was, my work reflected this passion and I moved to creating using BuddyPress full time.

When did you set up Logical Binary, and what have you learned since then?

Logical Binary was set up initially nearly 12 years ago as a way to showcase the work I was doing. It for a while was name only, my “web presence” only fully forming in 2005. I’d been doing freelance by word of mouth for a few years mixed in with agency work and needed a home online. Logical Binary, the site, grew from a need to take things a bit more seriously and focus on a business.

What I’ve learned over the years is to focus on what you love, and that niché is good. I’m not someone that can do everything — if you are then great but I design better when focused. Playing to my strengths is focusing on community design.

Talk to us about your strongly held belief in “design for humans.” Where can design go wrong when it loses sight of this idea?

I think my passion for designing for humans comes from my love of psychology, which I studied up to A-level and has impacted my entire life. Some of my first experiments on my own site were with theme switches by mood. It was a perhaps naive way of exploring back in 2006, but it was my first step outside of the single experience and thinking about who was using the site.

Design goes wrong when it assumes the operator at the end is the same. As a designer it’s easy to assume everyone will think like us — we’re not “every man.” I’m very into asking stupid questions of interfaces — this is when you see the gaps. Using the word “Submit” is a prime example — how unfriendly is that? Or a page that you land on with everything at the same level, everything shouting at you for attention. Where do you look? Our brains can’t handle it. We need paths, we need emotional feedback from what we interact with, we need guidance and we need common manners on sites.

You’re a heavy contributor to open source projects. How has that fed into your work life, opportunities, and learning?

I got my first taste of the ‘net from the Linux community many years ago. This was long before WordPress so when that showed on my radar I was already sold on open source. Whilst I’m not religious, I have one belief in life and that’s karma. I truly believe if I didn’t give back I’d not get anywhere near as much as I do in work life, opportunities, and learning. You truly do get out what you put in. The ease with which people share information is mind blowing and we should never forget how special that is.

I had the pleasure of attending BuddyCamp in Miami recently and it blew my mind. At one point I was told that there were several hundred people watching the live stream. This really filled me with energy to do more, create more, and get more people involved in BuddyPress. I truly believe that I’d not be where I was without the community, and I’m thankful every day for being part of this and those I’ve met. We’re united by a love for WordPress and BuddyPress, by an obsession with open source — this is a powerful thing.

What are you most proud of having contributed to BuddyPress, and what are you most excited about in terms of its future?

I’m most proud to have been able to contribute as a designer to BuddyPress. This may sound odd but it’s a misconception generally you have to be a developer to contribute. This is far from true of course. WordPress has blown this myth away but in some ways it hung around BuddyPress for a bit longer.

An exact contribution is tricky. I’m proud of organizing the default theme CSS file. I learned from looking at people’s code and hopefully this has helped other people. I’m also proud to have been part of the Status theme and Turtleshell project. I think above all I’m just stoked to be part of the BuddyPress project in a small way at this time.

I’ve described BuddyPress before, in terms of age, as starting school. It’s a young project but growing. I’m excited about getting more people involved beyond just developers. For BuddyPress to grow I really believe that not just developers should be part of its future and present. It’s really cool to see what can be built that isn’t using everything — maybe it’s just activity, maybe just groups, using BuddyPress as a platform, as an API and as a starting point to building a whole host of things with a dash of community — now that’s exciting.

As a specialist in BuddyPress, how would you explain the key benefits of making use of it over other alternatives a client or fellow designer might be considering?

BuddyPress, I’ve said before, is social lego. You can use as much or as little as you want. You pick the tools and create the community. That’s the big benefit at the start. You can, since the release of 1.7, do all this with a flick of a switch on your existing WordPress site. Default in communities only gets you so far. If you want to build, grow, and allow your community to take off, you need to go beyond default. BuddyPress lets you do this. It lets designers be free to create, it lets developers be free to build.

BuddyPress also has a very powerful community behind it full of passion, and an open sharing of information at its core. If you build on BuddyPress you get an entire community behind you from the start. I’m not ignorant to other solutions but no other option really allows for such ease, unique communities, and support of resources.

One of your many projects is buddydesignlabs.com. What were your goals in starting work on “lab” style projects, and how are they different from your contributions to BuddyPress itself, or the work you do for clients.

Buddy design labs is aimed at being an open-ended project for me. In it, I want to explore what could be for BuddyPress. I probably will develop some ideas into plugin form but I truly have no set goal. The reason I wanted to just indulge in pure speculation and exploration was that it frees me to think outside client projects. I’m not constrained by anyone’s requirements and that’s quite a powerful experiment.

The format I’m choosing is of a blog post. It shows my sketches and mockups and reminds me a lot of the sketchbooks we kept as art students that documented the work we did. In many regards that’s what this project is becoming for me. I used to love my sketchbooks and am growing as fond of Buddy design labs for the same reasons. It’s about musing, putting things out there, and seeing what happens.

You’ve worked with some really diverse clients. What would you say unifies them, and more broadly, what attracts you most in a potential client project?

Most get to me by word of mouth. I have to take a moment here to thank those who pass work on to me the BuddyPress core team specifically are amazing at spreading work among the community. Community is really the unifying element.

What gets me to take a project is understanding. Communities don’t just grow on trees, you have to understand their complexity and that there are no easy wins. Yes, it’s rewarding and powerful to have a community but it’s something that needs work. Not all communities are successful and sometimes I have to be honest about that to the prospective client and not take a project.

Out of all the work you’ve done, which project are you proudest of, and what challenges did it present to you?

I am most proud of being part of shift.ms. The current design isn’t my work but we’re going through a redesign and this is what I’m most proud of. As a client they’ve been very open to taking a step back and re-analyzing every part. It wasn’t an easy process but everyone involved had the community goals at the heart of every decision.

We’ve gone through focus groups, inspiration collection, wireframes, and are currently in the prototyping phase. I’ve had a lot of my own assumptions challenged during this process, too. The one that comes to mind is tag clouds. They’ve in many ways gone out of fashion; their users, though, love them. This backed up the fact that sometimes we should just ignore what is “trendy” and focus on the user. We’re brewing up some interesting takes on many traditional community functionality we’d have only thought of by going through this process.

Finally, you’re one of the organizers of WordCamp Europe. What’s the big idea there, and what are you most excited about?

WordCamp Europe is a celebration of the European WordPress community. It’s a two-day event in an amazing venue which several of the organizing team (myself included) visited for another conference in December. There’s a really strong community in Europe and we hope that this event highlights that.

I think I’m most excited about the focus being on Europe and showcasing all the amazing things we as a community do. I really think the time is right for an umbrella WordCamp like this.

Quick Overview

WPShout kicked off in 2009 and has been bringing a range of free resources, insightful opinion pieces, and useful tutorials ever since. With pieces on everything from the economics of premium themes, to comparison pieces on WordPress hosting services, with a side order of free ebook, screencast tutorials and more besides, it’s well worth your time.

Image based on shout by Krista Baltroka, CC-BY-2.0.

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
When you’re making things with code, it can be hard to keep up with the learning — the reading and research you need to do to make sure that your work reflects the latest ideas, techniques, and security best practices. Thankfully, if you build themes, The WordPress.com Theme Guide does the heavy lifting for you on escaping, internationalization, queries, scripts, styles, plugin conflicts, and more in an easy-to-scan checklist format. You’re welcome.

Image based on “Remington_Noiseless_Bedienungsanweisung_ 2” by Georg Sommeregger, CC-BY-2.0.