When I “meet” prospective WordPress clients I often get asked the same questions, so I decided to do a little Q&A where I interview myself and post the answers in the hopes that they can get to know me a little better before they hire me to create their custom WordPress theme.
Q: Where are you located?
A: Right now I am in an amazing slice of American called Acadiana. I am moving back to a small town in South Georgia – just North of the Florida border where I have lived previously in a few days. I used to live in Mississippi where I co-founded a successful web-dev company.
Q: Do you just do WordPress themes?
A: The short answer is yes, custom WordPress development is what I do professionally. With that I do allot of Photoshop and consulting in addition to the css/xhtml of the custom theme itself.
Q: What is your WordPress theme development process?
A: I’ll get some general info from the client such as suggested color schemes, colors to avoid, styles or sites that the client likes, number of columns, etc. I’ll do a mock up and the client tells me what he likes, doesn’t like, wants changed, etc. I don’t mind making changes, going back to the drawing board, whatever is needed within reason.
Eventually we get to a design that gets approved. I then cut it up and build a template on a staging site. Once we agree that the test site looks good we’ll settle up and I’ll zip up the theme and send it to the client so that he can install it on his installation of WordPress.
All the WordPress themes that I create are valid xhtml with css layout assuring that my clients sites are created with the latest web standards, are highly accessible, and render correctly on the vast majority of platforms and browsers.
Q: Why WordPress?
A: WordPress is what you use when you want to create a dynamic website that is standards compliant, easy to use, and relatively simple to customize. While WordPress may not be the right solution for a huge enterprise, it is more than capable of managing the vast majority of web sites on the interweb. It seems to me that it is the right tool for the job most of the time.
Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: I have been creating custom WordPress themes for 4 years, I have been creating websites professionally, non-stop, for 16 years.
Q: What is the turn around time for a custom WordPress theme?
A: This fluctuates based on my workload, but the current timeframe is 20-30 days.
Q: Can you host my WordPress site for me?
A: Sure, and it will be hosted on the same machine that I host my own sites on so you can be assured that if there is a problem I will address it asap. I do hosting for WordPress clients for $45/year.
Q: Can help me learn WordPress?
A: Sure, I offer hourly consulting at a reasonable rate.
If you have any additional questions feel free to use the comments form below and I’ll answer and ad them to this Q&A. You Can Contact Me Here
My family owns a funeral home and I have been toying with the idea of posting obituaries to a wordpress blog.
I would like for people to be able to create accounts and so forth.
Please contact me.
Thanks
May 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Hi there,
I have been fooling around with wordpress a little and was hoping to build a new website for my company, Pulse Lighting, using word press. Well I can’t seem to find a theme that has all of the functionality that I would like to use as well as a logical layout for what we do. I used to be a web developer before becoming a lighting designer so I understand alot of what is going on here but I fell like reverse engineering a word press theme is a little beyond my skills. We have so much killer imagery and video that the site should look awesome and right now it’s very basic and a bitch to update. I am looking for a site that showcases our talents in a professional way and is easy for us to update and upload pictures from the road and manage on the fly rather than spending a couple of days 3 times a year updating. I want the site to be a little more real time than that. Right now my portfolio is in 2 places, flickr for pictures (www.flickr.com/mobias) I really like the organization of that site. My video portfolio is a wordpress site (www.prestonhoffman.com). My brother doesn’t have a video portfolio and his pictures are mostly on facebook and flickr. so our media is kind of all over the place an our website is weak. So ideally I would like to pull everything together in a logical way in our website and really blow people’s socks off. We both have some downtime this winter to work on this and I would love your guidance. Sorry for the rambling email but I hope it gives you insight into the problem.
thanks,
-Preston
November 6th, 2009 at 11:35 pm