Profiles

Ballroom Dancing, fostering kittens, crocheting, renovations, medical dramas, a dark cup of coffee

In 2007 I started blogging. I made an epic 82 cents. Perhaps, I thought, a new blog design would help.

And this is when I totally lucked out! I didn’t’ realize it at the time, but the biggest and best WordPress experts were in the forums answering my questions.

Of course when you figure out how to change the colors in CSS, you can’t stop there! Then I had to change the sidebars (before there were widget areas) which meant learning XHTML. But the real fun came when I figured out the WordPress theme template tags and dabbled in PHP. Then I felt invincible (coders come by this attitude naturally). But when you learn the template tags, it gets addictive, like reading half of that suspense thriller. Not gonna happen.

So, I’m embarrassed to say that somehow it seemed perfectly natural to read the entire WordPress documentation site. During that time, I started answering questions in the forums, and working with themes by some random guy. He’s now a VP of Copyblogger and founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner.

Through the years, I donated my time to help more bloggers, created a plugin for Pink October and created some themes of our own. Blogging can be a tight knit community and once I helped a few friends, word spread and I started designing and coding for some fun money.

But a few years ago something started to happen or maybe I just noticed. There were – and are – a number of WordPress services that are at best, not helping, and at worst -taking advantage of non-technically-inclined bloggers. At the same time as this is happening, my circumstances changed and I became the sole income provider for my girls and I. And WP Barista wasn’t successful enough to support us full time. So I had some decisions to make.

Three months and a lot of tears later, WPBarista, in its current form was born. We’ve been serving bloggers and universities since 2008 with anything WordPress related.