I spoke at WordPress Chicago on June 6, 2010. In my presentation, I spoke about three ways theme developers can trim down and standardize their theme building efforts. My suggestions were:
- modularizing theme parts
- enacting naming conventions
- sharing theme options
I owe an entire post (heck, maybe three) to cover these ideas, but I’m going to save those for another day. But do check out the presentation below. If you were at WordCamp, drop a hello in the comment form, too.
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In his December 2 article Creative Haystack Listings, Jason Fried of 37signals used a sample from my advertisement on Haystack as an example of creative marketing on the service:
I’ll quote the exchange we had in the article’s comments:
(Me) Thanks for the mention! Haystack has [cliche alert] changed the way I do business. I’m booking clients with bigger budgets who actually come to me. That’s a vast improvement on trolling Craigslist where hardly anyone replies to emails and when they do, they “have a limited budget” (read: spec).
…Last month was the most profitable since I went freelance eight months ago and I don’t think it’d be possible without this service. Keep up the good work!
(JF) AWESOME . That warms us up inside! So glad to hear Haystack is bringing you good business. Thanks for listing. Continued success.
Wow, that whole writeup and exchange definitely made my day. Not only is Jason Fried one of my business heroes, but since I began freelancing, I’ve never been an example on a public blog. I feels great to be recognized—one of the things I miss most about working in an office.
Another funny thing is that the logo/slogan I created actually did take a while to get just right, so I appreciate the fact that someone took notice (I hope potential clients do, too). It was a design and marketing experiment that seems to have worked. By the way, I also appreciate the traffic spike I received from Signal vs. Noise that day. Thanks, guys!
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at OfficePort Chicago for the official 1-Day WordPress Workshop. This event seems to be sold out but hopefully, there will more workshops in the near future for those who can’t make it.
My topic list includes WordPress themes and plugins, so I thought I could provide a list ahead of time of some links we might use during the discussions.
Finding the Perfect WordPress Theme
WordPress Plugins List – The Most Useful + Highest Quality
- Fluency Admin
- Google Analyticator
- All in One SEO Pack
- Ajax Plugin Helper
- Akismet
- Redirection
- Twitter Tools
- WP-DBManager
- WP No Category Base
- Get the Image
- Gravity Forms
- Lightbox Plus
- flickrRSS
- Pods
- More Fields
- GigPress
…And Other WordPress Resources
