Interview with Ian Wilson

Interview, Speakers

Ian Wilson – twitter dark blue jeans social media icons designed by icons.mysitemyway.com facebook dark blue jeans social media icons designed by icons.mysitemyway.com LinkedIn dark blue jeans social media icons designed by icons.mysitemyway.com

Ian will be presenting Understanding WordPress Filters and Actions on Friday in the Foundation Friday 301 track

In past lives Ian has been a lead developer, lead designer, and Huffington Post guest blogger (among other things). Currently he runs design & code agency build/create alongside business partner Eric Lynch.

As a self taught developer, Ian started using WordPress in 2007, and immediately started looking for ways to better exploit its then more blog-oriented functionality for content management. Since then he has built a business around providing clients with WordPress powered sites that meld design and code into a seamless, intuitive, user experience.

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
I use WordPress because it makes for a better experience for my users, period. I love the community, and I love developing for it, but at the end of the day it’s about providing the best and easiest to use product for my clients, and WordPress allows me to do that.

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
Inspiration is a necessary part of life, and for me there’s little more inspiring than getting together with folks that share the same interests and problems and seeing how they tackle the same work you do. It opens up whole new ways of looking at your work.

Those little breakthroughs are what make WordCamp such a great investment in your professional skills, and loads of fun to boot!

What is your favorite WordPress project you have worked on recently?
We’ve been working on running more of our business on WordPress, and to that end I’ve been developing a CRM plugin. Basically just taking our sales process and turning into something that runs entirely on WordPress- from contact entry, to generating proposals, to reporting on close rates. If it turns out good we’ll probably release it as a premium plugin on our forthcoming plugin/theme shop.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to start or grow a WordPress based business?
Network, network, network. The WordPress community is amazing, leverage that to your advantage and you’re off to a great start. Focus on making sites that your clients aren’t afraid to use- they’ll be less likely to get broken over simple updates. Then either they can update their own site, which they’ll love you for, or you’ll at least make it easier on yourself to do the maintenance work.

What is your favorite WordPress-related resource?
The WordPress Codex! I swear I still use it all the time as a reference, few documentation repositories are as up to date and useful.

Tell us something awesome about yourself that is not WordPress related
I’ve been getting into making curry lately and it has been a complete revelation. I try to eat low carb a lot of the time, which sometimes means eating a lot of the same types of food over and over again. Curry has changed all that, so at least on a personal level, I think it’s pretty awesome.