It’s amazing the number of smart people who attend and who give their time generously to speak to others. I’m not going to name names here, but it got me thinking about the house that WordPress has built.

By “house” I mean it in a few different ways.

WordPress has changed many, many lives, including my own. Careers are different. Friendships have been formed. Lives altered.

Heck, WordPress now powers over 25% of the Internet and affects every Internet user.

Some of the things I learned:

• WordPress has literally built houses for people from the WordPress related income they have earned
• WordPress has allowed people to work from their homes and connect with their families
• WordPress has built amazing friendships, families, collaborations (people from different and competing companies shared rented houses to attend the conference)
• WordPress has built a community that should (most of the time) be envied
• WordPress updates and changes can affect people greatly

Of course, WordPress itself has not done any of this. It’s the people who have done it. People who are attracted to WordPress. People who are attracted to the WordPress community. People who are good people.

We all live in a community of WordPress houses.

[Interview with Alex King from Pressnomics 2016. Click here to see if you can’t see it]

It was very difficult giving up working for myself. It was needed for my sanity, health, and for my family and now I feel like the luckiest man in the world sometimes.

Lucky because I do a job I love.

Lucky because I work with some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.

Lucky because they don’t just feel like co-workers, but friends and even family.

Lucky because we all work very hard on something we’re passionate about.

Lucky because Automattic allow me the privilege of working hard for them.

Lucky because I have an amazingly supportive family (with two incredible kids).

Lucky I get to travel to places like Hawaii, Portland, Austin, Las Vegas, Belize, Phoenix and work there.

I hope you’re all as lucky as me.

So far I’ve also been to Portland and Hawaii, and I’ve only just begun…. Come work with us.

Now with 232 employees

It’s official – I’m now a Happiness Engineer for Automattic. I’m immensely proud to be employee 231 of this growing and unique company of truly passionate individuals.

Automattic provides WordPress.com, Jetpack, VaultPress, Simplenote, Gravatar, CloudUp… and the list goes on. I’ll be mainly providing support for users of WordPress.com, with some feature testing and bug tracking thrown in there.

It’s a company I’ve admired for a long time, and been interested in working for since I met Lance Willett back in April 2012 at WordCamp San Diego. We had a great chat about the company and the roles they offered. Fast forward to October 2013 and I bumped into Lance again at Pressnomics. We only had a brief chat them but it re-ignited a spark in me, so I investigated further.

Automattic don’t hire the traditional way (in fact, hardly anything is traditional about them/us). You have an interview (via text chat). Then if you’re good, a second interview. Then if you’ve even better you do a 4 – 6 week trial doing the job you’re interviewing for. This is paid at $25/hr regardless of what job it is you’re doing.

I did this in the evenings and weekends, as I had a full time job and didn’t want to disrupt/delay my clients I was working with. I already had long enough delays due to a large workload and didn’t want to make it worse for my clients. This can be the hardest part for most people – juggling two jobs and switching gears between them, and I was no exception.

If you’re successful in the trial you go to a final interview with Matt Mullenweg (online of course). If you’re successful then you’re hired

There are many companies that have tough application procedures, and I’ve been through a couple in my time (both successfully and not) but this was something very impressive. I’m extremely pleased and excited to have started my new role.

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about changing role, so I’ve summed up the answers here.

Why give up being an entrepreneur?

I haven’t given up being an entrepreneur, I don’t think that’s a job, more a way of thinking. It was over six years of working in my own business that I loved, and it felt like time for a change. I wouldn’t have stopped doing it for just anything or any company, it took something special.

Why do “help desk” support?

I’ve been providing support all my business life. Whether that’s been helping people sell more by analyzing their market, providing people with the tools to do their job more effectively or setting up people’s blogs and websites. Whether you make coffee or design buildings, you’re helping people achieve something that they want to achieve. How you provide that support varies but this way people have questions, and I help answer them.

You’re going to be trapped in 9 – 5 corporate hell!

Well first I reject that all corporate life is hell. Those selling certain online courses to “teach” you how to make a million dollars working from home will have you believe working for anyone but yourself is hell. But it’s simply not true. There are massive pros and massive cons to working for yourself. As a father of two young boys it was time for something without the incredibly long hours I used to put in and the stress and health issues that come with it. No job is free of stress and pressure but there are ways of managing it better in a structured framework. Such as working for a company that also does something you’re passionate about.

Why WordPress.com and not WordPress.org? I thought you said WordPress.org was better!

It’s not a competition Both have their strengths and weaknesses, so it simply depends on what you need and what restrictions you can live with. If you are wondering how WordPress.com differs from WordPress.org, this support article explains the distinction.

How’s the new commute?

Still about 6 seconds down the hallway! We’re a distributed company, so while we have a head office in San Francisco that you can work out of, we have people in 190 different cities around the world.

Hey that sounds cool, can I join you?

Sure, we’re hiring!

There are lots of further reading about Automattic and trials if you’re interested, such as:

Step Into the Office-Less Company

Hire by Auditions, Not Resumes

My experience on Trial at Automattic

Also feel free to ask me any burning questions you may have.

It’s bittersweet as I am starting a fantastic new job for a company I admire greatly, but more about that in another post.

BTG was started in 2007 as a way to provide low-cost custom work for WordPress.org users who didn’t necessarily have a big budget or need a lot of work, but needed someone reliable. It was a one man band, and still is today.

There were only a couple of us doing this kind of work back then, and even though it’s now a crowded marketplace I’ve been fortunate enough to work off referrals only with no promotion or advertising needed.

I’ve helped over 500 clients/customers/friends in the six and a half years I’ve been going, and I will sorely miss working with them.

However the time to move on has come, but don’t worry I won’t leave you hanging!

Around five years ago I started partnering with Andrew Rondeau from We Build Your Blog (WBYB) on a few ventures. His business started a little after mine, in 2008, and WBYB provide WordPress services – websites, blogs, sales pages, membership sites, maintenance and backups, online coaching and much more.

My services are all moving to Andrew who has been a trusted business partner and is the only person I can hand-on-heart recommend for great service and expert knowledge in all aspects of building your WordPress site. You can read more about him here, and see the WordPress website services he has to offer.

I’ll still be on here, occasionally blogging and generally distracting you, but my services are now in the very capable hands of Andrew at We Build Your Blog.

Thanks to all my wonderful customers over the years, I will keep in touch with many of you I’m sure. Don’t be a stranger!

However in my opinion their customer service and hosting performance has drastically reduced in the past few months. They were purchased by Endurance International Group who own around 50 web hosting and domain related companies. These include JustHost, HostMonster and Bluehost.

Bluehost has always been one I’ve used for cheap shared hosting with a lot of clients who already had hosting – but I too and getting more and more complaints about their hosting performance and service as they are sharing a datacenter with many of these other hosts. Phone and live chat support can have very long wait times.

So I now have three recommendations for a web host, all for different levels of service:

Small site, shared hosting

Dreamhost – Shared hosting plans start from around $8.95 per month, and this allows unlimited domains so you can host multiple sites under this account. Great for small starter sites.

Dedicated WordPress hosting

WPEngine – Rock solid hosting for WordPress sites only, with backups and caching built in. Starts at around $29 per month (for one site only, they have multiple site plans). Their support is superb.

Non-Dedicated WordPress hosting

SiteGround – This is who I use. If you also have other sites or landing pages, sales pages or squeeze pages that are not WordPress you need to have non-dedicated hosting that is solid and reliable and can cope with your site demands and with WordPress.

From now on, all links for HostGator should redirect to Dreamhost.

How have your experiences with HostGator and Bluehost been recently?

This year I’ve decided to do it again and need your help once more!

Movember is a worldwide event that essentially sees a lot of men grow a moustache / mustache for the entire month of November – hence Movember.

The event is in aid of prostate cancer, something that has personally affected my family more than once. If you wanted to, I’d be honored if you would sponsor me here. Click on Donate to Me, no amount is too small.

The campaign has a lot of goals

Campaign Strategy & Goals:
We will get men to grow moustaches and the community to support them by creating an innovative, fun and engaging annual Movember campaign that results in:
• Funds for men’s health program investment
• Conversations about men’s health that lead to:
– Greater awareness and understanding of the health risks men face
– Men taking action to remain well
– When men are sick they know what to do and take action

Program Goals:
Living with and Beyond Cancer
Men living with prostate or testicular cancer have the care needed to be physically and mentally well.

Staying Mentally Healthy, Living with and Beyond Mental Illness
• Men are mentally healthy and take action to remain well
• When men experience mental illness they take action early
• Men are not treated differently when they experience a mental illness

Men’s Health Research
We will fund innovative research that builds powerful, collaborative teams that accelerate:
• Improved clinical tests and treatments for prostate and testicular cancer
• Improved physical and mental health outcomes for men

You can donate in any currency and take part yourself in your part of the world (feel free to join my team!).

Any questions please let me know, and thanks in advance!

Firstly some more about Barry

After working for 25 years in film development for a food packaging manufacturer Barry has gone out on his own to develop some Ideas that he has had for a while .The first is the tennis ball tube (which sells around the world) and he is now finalizing a new concept in very lightweight ride on golf cart/mobility scooter. It’s taken 2 years but the end result will be pretty good. It flips up onto a car towbar like a bike rack.

I asked him a few questions about his site and product.

What is Pressure Ball?

I was fed up with throwing away perfectly good tennis balls because they were flat so I thought there must be some way to put the balls in a reusable pressure container like the ones that they are sold in. These point of sale cans are also pressurized to stop the balls going flat between the time of manufacture and the time of purchase.

Even though I had worked in plastic film development for 25 years it still took me 6 months to put together a robust but flexible tube that would hold the pressures required without stretching .The end result is a tube that will stop new tennis balls losing pressure and will also put pressure back into balls that have gone soft .

Who are your targeting as your reader and/or customers?

My target market is anyone who plays tennis reasonably regularly and ends up throwing out balls that have plenty of life left in the felt but no longer bounce correctly. I sell these tubes to tennis clubs for business house, intermediate or senior grades, where the felt can last a long time but the bounce doesn’t.

Anyone who cracks open a new tube of balls  but then doesn’t use them again for a few weeks will love Pressureball because your tennis balls will never be soft .And even if you do put them on a shelf for a period of time, you can always revive them.

Why did you set the website up?

I set up the website in order to market the tube worldwide .Because the tube is flexible and light weight my postage costs are not insurmountable even though New Zealand is so far away from the rest of the world.

Thanks for your time Barry! If you would like to be featured in a Client Spotlight, just contact me here.

I work with many themes for clients, and there are different themes for different circumstances, but Headway has improved once again.

Multiple and Fluid Wrappers

The screenshot below shows a site with three wrappers. These are separate sections of your site which operate independently.

There are many advantages to this with regards to design in having some full width sections and some boxed centered sections. However the reasons I love it are:

• I can now style full width even if I don’t use it – see my footer on my site. It’s a subtle change, probably no-one but me cares, but it now adds a nice end point to my site.
• I can mirror wrappers on templates. So on the home page template, or Shop template or Blog template, rather than having to alter the header and footer on each template when I change the layout – I can now just mirror the wrapper from the main template and changes within this wrapper automatically appear on the other templates.  Not only does this save me a lot of work but means I can play around with different layouts more easily.
• Fluid wrappers are now possible. Rather than repeat what is said elsewhere, there is an excellent guide to the different type of Headway wrappers here.

There are many more technical improvements, with different grid settings, fluid column widths, better iPad/tablet support, and so on.

However new features aren’t what keeps me on Headway. Grant, Clay and the team are always listening to customer feedback and bug reports. Three new versions have already been released in the short time 3.5 has been out to fix bugs and improve user work flow.

Like the airlines say, you have many choices when deciding which service is best for you. I use different themes for different projects, but for my own site I use Headway. For someone who works with different themes for hours every day hat’s saying a lot.