You have an interesting background which seems to have encouraged your entrepreneurial spirit. Take us back to the beginning…

Well, I always say I come from a family of horse traders. Not in the literal sense, but both my grandpa and dad have been entrepreneurs almost my entire life. It has always been instilled in me that having the freedom to work whenever and wherever I want far outweighed any type of risk in running my own business.

At an early age I competed at a high level in barrel racing and showing horses, from the age of seven to fourteen. We competed so much that I was homeschooled. We competed about four days a week, and the rest were for practicing. I think being a high level competitor coupled with having to do school on my own really prepared and molded me into being the type of person that can work on my own.

How did you first hear about WordPress?

I’d like to pretend that I was hip and cool or that I was part of an inner circle, but honestly it was my dad. He has always had computers around as early as I can remember. In 2005 when I was 21 and attending The Art Institute for Graphic Design, my dad, who at the time was a successful internet marketer made me come over to his house so he could “show me my future.” He made me sit down at his desk and pulled up a WP site he had made with the little “Hello World” Kubrick header, and he said, “Rachael, you have got to learn how to use this, and make headers for people…you will be rich!” I literally rolled my eyes and said, “This is what you made me come over here for?” Little did I know the seed he had planted inside of my head at the time.

After that he had one of his friends make me a WordPress website called thebannerqueen.com which was set up for me to sell my graphic services which included headers, banners, ebooks etc. All the really dorky internet marketing graphics in ‘05. At the same time we also set up virtualgraphicartist.com (VGA) where I would sell one-hour blocks of time where I would get on GotoMeeting with a client and he/she would direct me while I created their WordPress header or the other graphics we offered. It was going pretty well and it was a good little job that lasted several years while I was in school, but I was approached by a competitor to purchase both companies in 2008 and I jumped at the opportunity. To be honest I was a little burnt out on creating graphics and wasn’t really “loving” what I was doing. I think it mainly had to do with the internet marketing niche I had fallen into, and I wasn’t designing anything I had a real passion for. After I sold thebannerqueen and VGA I took a break from my computer and graphics, and I didn’t even check my email for a whole month. I took some time off school, hung out with friends, and skateboarded for about six months.

Did things change during your time away from working with WordPress?

Oh my goodness, yes! Themes were around while I was working at thebannerqueen and VGA but NOTHING like they had become when I came back in late 2009. Not to mention all the plugins and cool things you could do with them. Back when I first started if you asked people what WordPress was…well, honestly back then hardly anyone even knew what WordPress was, but if they did they would say oh ya, you mean a blog? When I came back into it the community had metastasized, and it was becoming more familiar to say “WordPress site or website” instead of “WordPress blog.” Which, because I am a geek I think that’s super cool. I love making WordPress websites and making people have to second guess if it is WordPress or not.

After a few years in the corporate world, you quit your day job and turned freelancing into a full-time business. What was this process like? Did you encounter challenges along the way?

I actually only spent a total of 5.5 months. Do you remember “Homie the Clown” from In Living Color where he would say “Homie don’t play that.” Well, that pretty much sums up how I feel about working in the corporate world. That isn’t to say I don’t love our corporate clients, but I am just not a 9-5 person.

The transition from working in the corporate world to running my own business came quite naturally to me since I had already run two companies, but this time I was determined to make it different. I chose to join the workforce because I thought I needed to rely on someone else to be the boss and to make the tough decisions. I thought my personality was the type where I needed to be directed and that I would prefer someone just telling me what graphics to make, but after being put into that exact position I realized I was the exact opposite. I found I enjoyed project management and being a leader. I had gotten a taste of working for someone else and I knew this was not the position God had planned for me. It definitely helped that my fiancé Ryan supported and believed in me 100%. I pretty much just built up enough clients on the side to have at least one month of business so I at least had a cushion. Which, looking back sounds ridiculous, but my business has grown consistently ever since and I never once felt like I made the wrong decision. I feel extremely blessed to say the least.

When I hear people talk about how bad the economy is and how you can’t start a business right now it makes me laugh because this doesn’t apply to web-based businesses. In all actuality a lot of people and companies are spending more money on their online presence to compete and keep their own business afloat. I don’t think the internet or websites are going anywhere for a while either.

My biggest challenge was finding the right people to be a part of the team. I read in the Sennza interview that that was their issue too, and it seems to be a common factor in our business. Often times clients come to me and they’ve been burned by a previous developer. Hopefully we as a community can come together to solve that problem by doing quality work and having better customer service. I am so blessed now to have a solid team working with me now. Jamie Brewer is our lead developer who writes amazingly clean code, and is my right hand man. Harry Martawijaya, the newest member of the team has added some super awesome design flair along with his custom illustrations (both computer and hand-drawn). Oh, and I can’t forget our little fuzzy friend Foxy the Papillon, my administrative assistant and loss prevention manager.

The second biggest challenge was once I started really obtaining a large amount of clients and growing a team, was whether to stay with my name/domain name rachaelbutts.com as my company name, as awful as it is, or move to a separate company name where we could all be housed under one roof. As I was doing some research I noticed this was an issue a lot of other freelancers were struggling with as well. Whether to give the illusion they were a firm or just showcase themselves as the designer. I had a different problem as we actually did have a team and it wasn’t just me, and I have a more of a “share the love” mentality. My goal wasn’t to set up a design firm and take all the credit and keep the team hidden. I wanted everyone to feel like they all played critical roles in the design and development process. If you look at our site now you will see everything is “we” and “us” and this is to show that we really are a team. The reason I had built off of rachaelbutts.com in the first place was it seemed through working with clients that often times they picked me because I came across as a “person” or individual. They felt they would be able to connect and talk to someone instead of being passed around within a company. This presented another problem however which was we could have been excluding larger corporate and B2B clients as they may see us as small and or inexperienced. This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise however because it turns out we found our niche and our highest profit ratio is with the smaller custom child themes because they are just simply easier to quote and much more accurate. We absolutely love designing the types of smaller sites we get to do because there always seems to be a lot more room for creativity. We do larger sites too, and sometimes like to mix it up of course, but we prefer the smaller more personal sites where we can really dig deep and translate a person or company’s message. For now we will stay where we are at because it seems to be working for us.

What are your favorite things about working for yourself?

#1—Working in my pajamas.
#2—I get to start my workday at noon.
#3—The satisfaction of knowing I am living the goal I set when I was 15.

Rachaelbutts.com has gone from a one-woman business to a four-person (plus one dog) team. Did your project management experience help prepare you for managing a team?

Definitely, and I would also add that project management is one of the most important parts of running a successful business as well. Not just between you and your employees/contractors but with the client as well.

Jamie and I try to do a weekly meeting each Monday where we go over our calendar together. We discuss projects that are coming up in the queue so he knows what to be prepared for, and we also go over and create timelines/deadlines together. We then place it all on our shared Google Calendar where his tasks are in green, and mine are in red.

For email communication I try to lay out emails very clearly with titles of items in bold and highlighted in yellow and the task itself right underneath it. We also set up our subjects lines with project name first like “rachaelbutts.com – subjects goes here.”

We have tried all the fancy project management systems but we found we spent more time putting the information into the system than needed, and it is just more efficient to use Google Calendar, Docs, and Gmail. Plus, they’re free!

For Gmail we create folders for each client. Each client is marked with a color. Green means I need to work on their project ( which correlates with the Google calendar), red means I need to reply to them, blue means I am waiting on the client, and purple means I am waiting on a team member. It works great.

The key is to be very efficient and effective all while maintaining a high quality of work.

What have you been working on that you are excited about?

We specialize in child themes, and we recently launched http://www.enlightened-eater.com/
which is running off the WOO framework. Harry created the background in the header which I think turned out quite nicely. I matched what he did with the background and created the logo and the rest of the elements on the site.

Another one we recently launched is the blog for Fusion Academy http://blog.fusionacademy.com/. It is one of our recent fav’s and an example of our custom theme service.

Harry created the guitar, skateboard, and tv illustrations. I designed the rest utilizing some Graphic River images for behind the slider and also did some custom graphics work.

It features a really cool drop down menu that Jamie developed which includes Google maps in it which we had to mimic after their main site which is not in WordPress. Of course we think our version of the navigation is better because it is running on WP.

On your website you state “rachaelbutts.com is my full-time job, but I don’t consider it a job. I consider it a goal that I achieved.” What advice do you have for others that have similar goals?

Confidence. Just believe in yourself: you CAN run your own business if you really want to. If you’re a beginner remember that we were all beginners at some point. You cannot live your life with the “what ifs.” What if you never try? When you wake up 20 years from now are you going to be mad that you tried and possibly failed, or never tried at all? Sure, every business has its ups and downs, but when you write down a list of pros and cons you’ll see a much longer list for pros, and you’ll find most of the cons to be fears that may or may not ever even happen. Live in the now, and focus on today. Focus on your determination and surround yourself with like-minded individuals that will support you.

If you want to be designer or developer for WordPress specifically, get involved locally with WordPress meetups. Subscribe to blogs to stay up to date on the latest news, trends, and business practices like Code Poet and WP Candy, and reach out to others in your community. I know I was nervous as an amateur talking to other WordPress professionals, but the more I did the more I found how willing they were to share their advice with me and remember that they were amateurs once too. We all have come from a humble beginning and this is especially true I believe with WordPress.

For more on Rachael, visit rachaelbutts.com or follow her on Twitter at @rachaelbutts.

When did you realize the importance of good project management?

Good project management is about managing cash flow and getting paid. You have to keep the project going, so you reach a point in the project where you can get your next check. For years I searched for the “perfect” project management application thinking that if I had the right software, my project would go more smoothly and I would make more money. Good project management is not about the software, it’s about communication and setting or resetting expectations.

Can you share some tips for communicating with clients effectively and for managing and setting their expectations?

1. Set up a regular status update schedule

With most clients I do a weekly call or email. If the schedule is tight or the site is feature rich and I need feedback more often, I will do the call twice a week. Calls are always better when you need answers to decisions. Even if you don’t have any sort of an update, i.e., “there hasn’t been anything new to show you. We are still working on the code.” It gives the client the opportunity to ask questions and makes them feel at ease, knowing that things are moving forward.

2. Warn of blackout period during production

In the beginning of a project, there is a lot of quick back and forth, because the tasks are easier. There’s a lot of discovery, conversation, questions, etc. Even wireframing and design takes less time than production. This sets an expectation with the client that all things get done quickly. What happens during production is that things are slow and there isn’t a fast turnaround. Let clients know ahead of time, so they don’t get upset thinking that the process is moving slowly, when really, it’s taking the time required.

3. Projects get weird at three months, meet up

Long projects, i.e., six months or more, get weary. Everyone in the project starts to get used to looking at the same thing day after day. It’s easy to fall into a comfortable position where you’re just updating the client by email or phone. If you are on a long project, take some time to meet face-to-face with the client, even if you don’t have anything to show. It’s a great way to catch up, discuss anything new or get answers to lingering questions.

4. Go live on a Tuesday

Monday is a terrible day to launch. Most people are shocked that they have to be at work in the first place, so go live on a Tuesday. Friday is a terrible day to launch, because if there are any problems with any of the hosting, developers or any other tech, most people are gone or respond slowly. You want everyone’s full attention when you launch. It’s a big deal and you should make it a big deal for everyone involved. You may launch websites often, but for your client, this is the culmination of a lot of time and money and even possibly their dreams.

5. Follow up with your client in a week, really

Once the site is launched, meet face-to-face with the client to discuss how things are going. If the client is really busy, make it in two weeks or even a month. The client is going to be overwhelmed once the site is launched. Follow up with them to see if the assumptions you had were correct. Also, this is a great time for your client to ask questions that they forgot.

6. If you messed up, fix it

Many times you may find that you forgot something that needed to be done or you may have told the client that it would work a certain way and now it doesn’t, because it would have taken much more work. Well, you have to do what you said you were going to do. The bottom line is, if you messed up, you have to fix it—no questions. If you don’t, every person that client comes into contact with will hear how horrible you were and that you didn’t do the right thing. It’s harder to change people’s perceptions once they have an idea of who you are. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should do something out of scope, but if you told your client you were going to do something and you didn’t, you should do it.

7. If they want more, charge for it

At the end of a project the client might ask for more work. They have had a lot of time to think about the project and some of their original ideas may have changed. The problem is they may not have said anything to you until the end. That’s not your fault. If the client wants any more work at the end or during the project, you have to charge for it. You have to create a new estimate and charge for that item. It’s above and beyond the current scope of work.

When it comes to methods, what works best for you?

I spoke about this at the Orange County WordPress Meetup. Whether you use Waterfall, Agile or Scrum, it has to make sense for your project and your team. I use the Waterfall method, because clients get it and there is precedent for it. The client commissions something, you build it, and then they pay you. It’s a very simple transaction process that clients can relate to and one less thing they have to learn.

Can you describe the Waterfall method?

The waterfall method is very step-based, i.e., first this, then this, then this, etc. Each step depends on the one before it. That’s why a lot of people can relate to it, i.e., “If you do this, I’ll do this.” For most web projects this process works fine. You can read more about the waterfall process.

Would you mind sharing a bit about your process?

I’ve refined my process over the years, mostly because project sizes and budgets have changed. Also, clients are smarter. They know what a website is now and probably already had a couple built for them, so by the time I’m on the project, it’s deciphering what they need now.

This is my process:

• Meet / Estimate / Contract
• Kickoff / Mindmap / Schedule
• Wireframes / Site Architecture
• Design Mockups / Key Pages
• Development / Content
• Reviews / Fixes / Launch

Are there any standard documents you use?

I do a lot of my business over the phone and through email. I have many clients I have never met, so it’s important to establish credibility and likability quickly. I have a the following documents that I normally use:

• Welcome Document: the Welcome Document explains who Crowded Sites is and what we stand for.
• FreshBooks Estimate: I use the FreshBooks Estimate to pre-qualify clients before writing a full blown proposal and scope. The “Accept” button is a great way to get a client mentally committed to the project.
• Contract: I always use a contract. Always.
• FreshBooks Invoice: the FreshBooks Invoice is like having my own receivables team at my fingertips. It automatically sends out multiple invoices and tracks activity.
• Kickoff: the Kickoff Sheet summarizes the project and provides all contact information in one place.
• Mindmap: I don’t do website questionnaires and I recommend if anyone else is still doing that, stop it. Do a mind map with your client. It’s a great way to learn about the project and establish a relationship with your client.
• Schedule: the Schedule is one of the most important documents. It shows the website building process and outlines what we expect from the client at certain stages of the project.

Other documents I use are standard, but different for every client, including wireframes, site architecture, and design.

How do you deal with time frame and expectations?

I never commit to milestone deadlines, unless there is an event that is coming up that is very important for the client. I’ve found deadlines are never met and create a false anxiety over the whole project. The reality is that projects get delayed, for whatever reason, all the time. Then we’re stuck with these dates and don’t know what to do with them. If there are ever issues with delivery dates I always call and speak to the client and reset expectations. Many business owners make the mistake of not talking to their clients when things get delayed. This just builds up hostility. Managing client expectations is probably the most important task of project management.

After you’ve delivered the finished product, what are your guidelines for revisions and ongoing maintenance?

Here’s how I manage revisions during the building process:

• Five hours of revisions only
• Two rounds of revisions
• Create list one, do list one
• Create list two, do list two
• Additional revisions require a new estimate and are charged at $150 per hour
• Test like crazy – Browserstack.com

Ongoing maintenance is charged at a fixed bid per project. I have offered many different maintenance packages over the years. Currently don’t offer maintenance packages.

Throughout the process, how do you keep yourself on track and organized?

I use OmniFocus for tasks and have weekly calls with clients for updates. For larger projects and teams I will use a Google Spreadsheet.

How do you measure the success of a project?

A project is successful if the client likes it, it’s achieved its business goals and it converts users.

Is there a project that you’re particularly proud of? Can you share a bit about the goals and results?

For the last several years I’ve worked almost exclusively with small businesses. Many small businesses today are created by refugees from the corporate world who know the value of a website and know that it takes some work to make it great. They’re willing to put in the time and the budget to make it great.

One of the sites I am most proud of is a site we soft launched toward the end of last year, EatMarketplace.com. They’re a catering company that also has their own storefront. The storefront serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner four days a week. The storefront didn’t even open until a couple of months ago, so the website was scaled back at the time just to create awareness, but also to attract orders for the catering side of the business. The owner is very creative so the building and maintenance of the site is a challenge, but we’re getting closer! Our user and business goals were to get people to understand that the EatMarketplace.com is an organic food business and then invite site visitors to contact them for catering or come in for food. With little more than site updates, Facebook, and Twitter, the site is receiving about 2k to 3k visitors per month. We have reached a point where we have to clean up the site a little, get on a better schedule, and coordinate conversions better, but I am exceptionally proud at how the client has handled the success. The other day she was complaining that customers were complaining that there was no place to sit. She told them to stand, the food was worth it. So they did.

Since adopting a plan for project management, how has your business changed?

Clients and projects are not predictable, but your process is. You know exactly what’s going to happen. When and if it doesn’t happen the way you expect, you have a process for that too. The other thing is, you have to stick to that plan. If you normally get deposits and the client doesn’t pay deposits, then don’t work with that client. Having a plan has kept my business viable, sustainable, and profitable.

Anything else that you’d like to share?

I think more emphasis needs to be put on the developers to make their clients as successful as possible. Having a bunch of WordPress websites that are poorly executed and will be taken down in a year, doesn’t help developers or their clients.

For more on Wes, visit crowdedsites.com or follow him on Twitter at @CrowdedSites.

When did you first start creating websites?

Ruth: We first started creating websites in January of 2011, and started using WordPress almost exclusively a few months later.

Can you describe your workflow before WordPress? What platform where you using, if any? Why did you switch?

Ruth: Before we came to WordPress we built sites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For anything more than a small site, our workflow quickly became tedious, and we rarely worked together on projects. From the beginning, it was obvious that we needed to adopt a framework or CMS. Initially, we pursued Django because it’s written in Python and has some very attractive selling points. After realizing that most of our projected customer base for the next few years would likely be small businesses and individuals, we decided that it would be easier to sell a more popular CMS. This brought us to the famous PHP options: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. After some market analysis, we decided on WordPress and haven’t looked back since.

What challenges do you face as developers?

Ruth: One of our biggest challenges is time management—we work in a very competitive freelance market and many of our clients don’t have big web development budgets, so we have to produce a lot of websites if we want to make ends meet. One way we deal with time constraints—which seems a bit counter-intuitive—is by spending a lot of time communicating with our clients. If we know what our client wants, and what their business needs are from the start, we can spend more of our development time productively, and less of our time creating the wrong features and changing things after the fact.

Beyond that, some other challenges include managing client expectations and scope creep—many of our clients are starting new businesses—they want to take over the world and they are hugely excited about their websites. We handle this challenge on a client-by-client basis. For most clients, a clear outline of the scope of the job before we start and an offer to add features at our regular hourly rate keeps things reasonable. We’ve learned to filter out clients who rush to the building phase before adequately planning their business startup. It’s next to impossible to make someone happy when they call each day with a brand new vision for their site.

What is your approach to project management?

Ruth: Being a two-person team that works from the same office, we find project management pretty easy. We do smaller projects individually and work on larger projects together. Our best way to manage team projects and avoid stepping on each other’s toes is to divide the work between form and function. Our division of labor is loose however, and we often simply take on different tasks throughout the day and keep synced by checking in with each other frequently.

Between the two of you, who handles form? Who handles function? Can you describe a typical workflow?

Ruth: In the beginning, we envisioned a clean break between front and back-end, but for our average WordPress build, this just isn’t that practical since it’s often 30% back-end and 70% front-end. For smaller sites we typically don’t work together, so we’ve both become fairly comfortable switching gears at every level, though I have more programming experience and Jonathan has more front-end and design experience. As we take on more sophisticated theme builds where functionality occupies more of the development focus, I can spend a larger portion of time developing the back-end and dealing with custom functionality requests.

Here’s a typical workflow: we collaborate a great deal during the planning phase and hammer out a plan for all the different components of the site. I head to the bat cave to build loops and functions while Jonathan cranks out HTML5, LESS, and design-level jQuery and begins building templates, menus, and widget designs. Emailing and client communication can be taxing, so we trade-off depending on who needs to focus the most at any one time. Toward project completion, the front/back-end division of labor breaks down a bit as we launch all the sections of the site and begin the quality assurance phase. Using LESS has helped us to pursue a more modular approach to styling that cuts down on redundancy and us stepping on each other’s toes during this phase.

How has your business changed since implementing WordPress?

Ruth: WordPress has been a slingshot into functionality for us. WordPress’ in-built functionality, its ease of customization, and plugin availability allows us to quickly give our clients features that would take us weeks or months to build from scratch.

Additionally, being WordPress specialists is a bit of a selling point—WordPress is a hugely popular platform, and many people come to us with WordPress already in mind—so having a portfolio filled with WordPress sites gives us an edge over other developers.

We’ve even heard from prospective clients, “yeah I need a WordPress site—I’m not sure exactly what that means but I hear it’s good.”

What features, plugins or themes do you most frequently use on your clients’ sites?

Ruth: For most of our clients we develop custom themes—either from existing websites and designs, or from scratch. We build our themes on Starkers HTML5. We often use WordPress’ ability to make custom post types and taxonomies, custom fields, and metaboxes. We frequently use Contact Form 7, Snapshot Backup, SEO by Yoast, WP Super Cache, Shadowbox, and Adminimize.

We have used WPML in the past and were pretty impressed at its ability to streamline translation management and language switching.

Underthinkit was an interesting site to build because the client was particularly concerned with edit-ability, and wanted to minimize the need to use HTML to edit the site. We built the back-end with extra visual editors and maximized the use of customized widgets, custom post types and custom taxonomies to make the administration of the site as smooth as possible. We made it possible for the client to use the visual menu editor to set up each menu item on the homepage drop-down menu to retrieve content from both a post category and an unrelated custom taxonomy simultaneously.

Have you created any plugins or themes of your own?

Ruth: Yes—we often develop custom themes with plug-in-like functionality built in. We have also made a couple of plugins for our clients, but nothing publicly available yet.

Regarding plugins, can you give us a sense of the functionality of the plugins you’ve created?

Ruth: It’s always a toss-up on where to draw the line between themes and plugins, and many of our sites are based around content management functionality that’s in traditional plugin territory. We’ve decided it’s more efficient to accommodate clients who are uncomfortable with anything other than WYSIWYG than it is to provide the additional follow-up teaching/support when they need to edit things later. When we can, we go heavy on custom metaboxes and fields, multiple editor panels, custom content types, and enhanced versions of WordPress widgets. Basically, we like to keep our clients completely out of the code. Examples include custom Q&A entry management for large FAQ libraries, systems for managing shared and unique sections of a large number of custom sales landing pages, and using individual custom content posts to populate jQuery sliders.

Sometimes we take the work of others and expand on it to fit our needs. For example, we built an entire theme around Supersized—a jQuery full-screen background slideshow by Sam Dunn. This includes an easy way to attach individual images and galleries to specific posts/pages and AJAX retrieval of pages/posts with corresponding slide transitions. Later we made an options page for this where people could change the size, location, and style of the content windows using a posh jQuery UI interface. We’d like to release this in the repository eventually, but it’s often on the back-burner as we focus on paid work.

What resources do you turn to to keep learning about WordPress? Are there any blogs, publications, podcasts, etc., that you find useful that you would recommend?

Ruth: We’ve browsed a number of books on WordPress but have found that the WordPress Codex is almost always sufficient to answer our questions. We absolutely love the varied contributions to SmashingMagazine.com and follow their publications almost daily.

What’s the one thing you wish someone told you when you were starting out, but you ended up having to learn the hard way?

Ruth: I wish someone had told me to use WordPress to build myself a site and play around with plugins before making sites for clients. When I first started with WordPress I often found myself re-inventing the wheel only to find out later that there was a WordPress feature already built in, or a plugin that could do what I needed.

Jonathan: I wish someone had told me to stay away from jobs involving major layout modifications to premium themes when you don’t have control over the design. Many premium themes are heavily built and it’s almost always easier just to whip up something from scratch than to accommodate a design that is out of touch with the theme.

What does the future hold for Wild Sea Press?

Ruth: As a business, we’re hoping to move from a bootstrapped home office to a brick and mortar establishment in the next year or so where we can meet with clients face-to face, and with this, we hope to move toward building total solutions (from brainstorming through implementation and maintenance) for our clients.

As individuals, we are always working to broaden our skill sets. We are very excited about WordPress plugin development—both of us enjoy working on the functionality end of websites, and we’re eager to release our first public plugin. We are also very interested in mobile development—not just websites that look good on smartphones, but AJAX based web apps that are really made for the smartphone interface.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Ruth: One of the things that I really enjoy about WordPress is how easy it is for our clients to use—I think that a lot of people expect that managing their new website is going to be difficult and confusing, and I love showing people around the dashboard and seeing them take to it easily.

Jonathan: I particularly enjoy shattering people’s preconceptions of WordPress as “just a blogging platform.” I’m always flattered when someone looks at a website I’ve built and exclaims “that’s WordPress?!”

For more on Jonathan and Ruth, visit wildseapress.com.