Profiles

Software, AI, Boating, Reading

I first started using WordPress in 2006. I had built a major website for an auto accessories company in Seattle using Dreamweaver, and I had paid a database development company to create the backend. That build took over six months and cost a great deal of money, and the company was never happy with it. After three months of tweaks and back-and-forth with the database company, I decided to try WordPress, which had been getting significant press. In three weeks I built them a system that exceeded the old one in every way. I never went back to Dreamweaver or the database company, and I have been building on WordPress ever since.

I started teaching WordPress classes in Seattle in 2007 and kept teaching until 2013, and the teaching habit never really left me. Today I run Altius Central, a software and consulting company in Chandler, Arizona, where WordPress remains the basis of every website we create, now paired with open-source tools like SuiteCRM so small businesses can own their systems instead of renting them. I write the Approachable book series on the same theme, and I still teach, these days helping small business owners get comfortable with AI.

Twenty years after WordPress rescued that first project, I have just published my first plugin to the directory, Altius Workspace. It feels right to finally give something back to the platform that has carried every site I have built since 2006.