Profiles

Originally, I got into WordPress at my first full time job by pushing it to the management as a better way for us to create sites for our clients.

At the time, we largely used Adobe Dreamweaver templates with custom PHP for each site. Much of the content was hard coded, and for our SEO side of the business, very hard to deal with. We used other CMS’ like Drupal and Magento, but very rarely WordPress. Our technical director considered WordPress sites (or any site with a database) too difficult or costly to manage over time.

Eventually, the SEO department worked with the developers “in the trenches” to convince management to default to make every site WordPress by default. This was a win on multiple fronts, as it allowed us to no longer have to edit content for the client when they wanted a change, the clients appreciated being able to edit and use the site on their own, our SEO department was able to leverage plugins like Yoast to make their jobs easier and more efficient, developers were able to leverage other plugins to add extra functionality that before would’ve not been possible or cost prohibited, developers benefited from having more standardized use of PHP between themes, and more. WordPress really helped that company take off.

As the years went by, I went to other agencies and continued to encounter WordPress and got to know it better. I’ve worked on small mom and pop shops to Fortune 500s on it. On occasion, I’ve even got to contribute to it (Gutenberg accessibility).