WordPress Development
While I don’t code brand new themes from the ground up, I do consider myself a WordPress Developer. I often refer to what I do as WordPress Manipulation because I’m really good about taking your design or ideas and finding a good quality theme to use as a base. From there I make modifications to create the site of your dreams.
I do a lot more than change colors, images, and fonts. I can often edit functions, add new options and customize tools to make your site both sharp and functional.
Where it All Started…
When I was 14 my family moved across the country. This was in 1998, before most people had their own websites, and long before blogs were a thing. I used Microsoft Publisher to create an HTML website which I updated on a regular basis to create an online journal that I could share with friends back home.
Eventually, I graduated to building sites with FrontPage and hosting them on Geocities. I also did a lot of customization for friends’ MySpace profiles. Y’all remember those sites with the falling snowflakes, sparkling colorful backgrounds, and crazy stickers? Today they’d make our eyes bleed, but they were really something back then. My years of building websites for myself and for small businesses taught me a lot about HTML and CSS.
Next up? Dreamweaver! Wow, what a step up that felt like. Suddenly I had professional software and I could build beautiful sites to host on all these new web hosts that were popping up as having a personal site became more popular. I started designing custom themes for the Blogger platform and had clients all over the globe lining up to have their sites designed. My business was born!
As a blogger myself, I became very familiar with some of the up and coming platforms and decided that I preferred WordPress. For a while, I designed for both Blogger and WordPress but quickly settled on the WordPress platform.
My Process
As I mentioned above, I don’t like to reinvent the wheel. If there is a great theme out there, created by a respectable developer, that I can modify to meet your needs, I’m going to go that route. It saves us both time (and saves you money) and it gives us a good strong base to build on. I look at these themes as a skeleton. Our final design may not look anything like the original, but the general layout or functionality is there and I can usually manipulate the design to suit your needs and desires. It is always a fun challenge to find just the right base and to build something unique from it.
Fun Personal Facts
- Wife
- Homeschooling Mom of 3
- Work from Home WordPress Web Developer
- Automotive Journalist
- 1st Degree Black Belt, Songham Taekwondo
- Blue Belt – Krav Maga
- Skip Barber Racing School Graduate
- Cake Decorator
- Photographer
- Singer