During the summer of 2009, I started freelancing for various friends, family and small businesses. Because my day job was doing Rails work, I started doing a few projects in Rails, but quickly decided I needed something else, something that was already setup for the most part. So I moved to WordPress. I was able to quickly produce websites where it would take several hours, days, and sometimes, weeks longer to do with Rails. WordPress’ popularity was also growing rapidly so it was starting to become common to run into people that were familiar with it or had heard of it. Whereas they hadn’t heard of Rails.

As I was starting to do more and more freelance work, I decided I needed to find a couple of good quality themes that I could really focus on and become proficient in it so that I would be able to use them as my theme/s of choice. It was also important to me to find a theme that I could also become a part of the community. As the WordPress community graciously accepted me back into their open arms, I wanted to make sure that the theme I’d be using all the time was a great community to be a part of.

Requirements for a Theme

My list of requirements of a theme were fairly simple. It had to be easily customizable. Because let’s face it, who really wants a website that looks like everyone else’s? I wanted it to be dead simple to make changes. Coming from a web development background, I knew and understood HTML, CSS, and PHP, so I didn’t mind getting into the code.

Another big feature the theme had to have was a way for developers to “hook” into the code with PHP. This way I could easily manipulate the design, move content around, and so on. It also needed to use as many of the WordPress features as possible. Basically what I was looking for was something that had 80% of completion for the majority of the projects I was taking on (blogs and simple content management sites, small business websites).

Selecting a Theme

So selecting a theme was actually a little harder than I thought it would have been. I first started searching the free themes available on the WordPress.org themes site. I figured that would be the best place to look. It would be open source and I would be able to contribute back to it if it didn’t have everything in it I wanted.

However, after looking through the popular themes in the Theme Directory, I decided I need to look in the premium theme arena. Because let’s face it. If there’s money behind it, then it’s bound to be worthwhile. That said, I started asking around the WordPress.org forums and friends in the community, and found about a small handful of themes to really look at. After carefully looking them over I narrowed them down to the following: iThemes, StudioPress’ Genesis Framework, Headway Themes, Press75 and Thesis. These were all recommended products to me and I wanted to give them a shot.

I put up the money upfront and use a theme from each company a project. I figured that would be the best way to really see which theme I was going to use for the foreseeable future.

iThemes

I don’t remember off the top of my head what I bought from them (it has been quite the time now). But I wasn’t happy with it. It was missing features I needed and if I recall it wasn’t going to fit my 80% needs of working with every site. I do know that at the time it was not Builder.

StudioPress’ Genesis Framework

This theme wasn’t that bad, however it required a lot of code. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a code monkey and don’t mind living in writing code all day, but my goal is to have something that fits the needs of 80% of my target clientele and this actually required me to do designs before hand, or hire someone to do designs. This ended up cutting into my bottom line, which I didn’t want to have to deal with.

Headway Themes

When I first started out, I wasn’t very happy with it. What I liked about it was that I could quickly turn out a design and not have to worry about sitting in code all day. It was a little ahead of it’s time when I started, but it wasn’t what I wanted to deal with all the time. (Keep in mind this was right after it was released. There have been a ton of updates since there, including a complete rewrite and I know use it exclusively.)

Press75

These themes are awesome. I love the work Jason does and would use them for one off projects, but I couldn’t use them for all of my projects. I do use them for some things but not a lot anymore.

Thesis Theme Framework

This was probably the most popular theme and theme framework at the time. It was nice to have a lot of the functionality I was looking for and a way to produce it out very quickly. It actually allowed to to pump out updates very quickly and in the budget my clients were willing to pay.

At the end of all of this, I ended up with theme licenses from each of these companies and a theme, Thesis, that allowed me to do quality work in a budget that my clients would pay, and one I was willing to accept. Life was grand until the spring/summer of 2010.

The Tipping Point

Around the early part of the summer of 2010, there was this debate that started in the WordPress community. During this time I was listening to all sides and trying to see where things were going to land. When I hear the Matt Mullenweg publicly say he was going to sue DIY Themes over Thesis’ license, I decided I needed to make a change.

I immediately started looking at the themes I bought and got the updates and started playing around with them again. It was around the end of July I redesigned my site with Headway Themes and saw how incredible it was. I was hooked! I understood it right away and started getting as much information as I could about it. I was in the forums reading just about every post ever added. I learned how they were allowing developers hook into things with Easy Hooks, and Hooks so I could write code. I saw that they had APIs for skins (think Child Themes), and leafs (now Blocks with version 3.0). It was actually pretty cool to see all they were doing. They were marketing themselves as a no coding theme, but they had features built for developers as well.

The Change

After a few weeks of playing around with Headway, I started helping people out in the forums. Keep in mind I wanted to be part of the community that themes create. I wanted to get to know the community and it’s members so that I could be one of them as well. I wanted to share my experiences with Headway and learn from others in the community as well. During this time, I was not only helping people out, but they were helping me out. It wasn’t till around November I would be asked to join them.

Grant emailed me asking me about my experience with Headway and that he had noticed that I was helping out a lot in the forums. He wanted to offer me a job. Instead of just answering questions in the forums for free. they were willing to pay me. I thought, well of course I’ll take some money for being part of the community! People were already looking up to me, I was getting specific Headway design/development jobs based on helping people in the forums, so why not work as a moderator to help people out and get paid.

The rest of the Headway story is pretty much there. I know work pretty much fulltime for them and take on projects as need be. I use Headway Themes exclusively for designing and developing websites on WordPress. I haven’t taken that many projects in the last couple of months as we’ve been working heavily on version 3.0 and everything that goes along with publishing a release. I’ve been doing more tutorials over at the Headway Themes blog, and Headway Hub, and will be putting more out there in the next couple of weeks. I’ve also been developing some free starter child themes and a couple of blocks that will be released after the new year.

If you haven’t bought Headway Themes yet, you definitely should take a look at the theme. It convinced me a long time ago, and now I practically don’t use another theme!

The Ruby on Rails Years

During the few years I was doing Ruby on Rails work, I saw a couple of things. The biggest one is that every project whether it was something I was doing for my day job or any freelance work I picked up required you to pretty much start from scratch. This meant that I had to build a login system, an user management system, and on and on. This wasn’t too big of a deal because some project had different requirements like user accounts had to work with a LDAP server, or some other system. There was the possibility of using code between projects in some cases, but not all. This meant that I had to build reusable libraries or find open source ones that I could utilize. Again, this wasn’t a big deal. As the Rails community was still new, there was a lot of people doing the same thing, so everyone contributed to some of the same projects/libraries and this provided everyone in the community a way to develop faster. As life happened and forced me to move back to Michigan, I found a job I wasn’t necessarily happy with, but took because I knew of the economy outlook in Michigan, so I was grateful just to find something in the software development field.

While working my day job, I started a freelance web design/development company. I tried to have it focus with small businesses and wanted to keep doing Ruby on Rails development. It turned out that no one in Michigan really wanted to pay the price and time that it took build a Ruby on Rails app with 1 developer. Sure some rails developers will say that you could use one of the many open source CMS projects out there, and yes, I did. I used RadiantCMS. But that only got me about half way there. I still needed a good reliable host, some custom code so that RadiantCMS would work for the client, and then design it. Needless to say everything that I needed to do and charge for, I couldn’t get clients.

The Breaking Point

It was around this time that I decided I needed to find something that was closer to being done. I had a couple of requirements. It needed to be open-source. It needed to be something that could be customized for each client. And it needed to be something that I was familiar with or could get familiar with. I decided to look at three open-source projects, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. I had used all three in previous projects and was using WordPress for my blogging platform of choice. Each project had it’s differences and were all good choices, but in the end I went with WordPress. I was already used to how plugins and themes worked, or at least had a general idea of how they worked since I was using it as a blog platform. I had also worked with it before previously and so I didn’t have a big problem getting back into it.

Quality vs quantity

WordPress is a great tool not only to put your blog on but you can put your small business web presence on. It enables you to do everything I was trying to achieve with RadiantCMS but at half the price. I can not only find hosts that work with WordPress very well, but they were more cost effective for people that were wanting a couple site on the same account. It was also easier for the clients to semi-manage, whereas Rails apps pretty much required maintenance contracts.

WordPress was working out great. I was able to still use projects (plugins) the were open-source, I could create my own projects if need be, and I could easily build reusable code. I didn’t have to worry about building in security into the app/website, it was already built in to WordPress.

Endless Choices

WordPress has endless options and so at the end of the day I felt more comfortable giving my clients a site designed and developed on top of WordPress, then I did with RadiantCMS. It wasn’t because I knew I would have job security or that I would constantly have work from clients because I had they had a site built on Rails. I also felt better because the WordPress development community was bigger than the Rails community, so I could hire freelancers for projects when I needed the extra help a little easier than I could with someone from the Rails community.

I also felt that people from the Rails community were a little snobbish (not everyone, but some freelancers I tried working with). They always had higher hourly rates and had too many “demands.” At the end of the day, that was cutting into my bottom line. Remember that I am gearing my freelance business towards small businesses in Michigan, that don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to spend on a website and hosting. The WordPress community on the other hand was much larger (it’s a pretty popular piece of software) and so I had the ability to pick and choose the freelancers I worked with. It also meant that because there were so many of them, I could also get a cheaper hourly work (quality of the work was the same) and that meant that my bottom line wasn’t cut into as much.

Where does it end?

This is where my story ends…for now. I have been working with WordPress non-stop since the middle of 2009 and can say that without a doubt it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. I’ve been able to make a living off of WordPress. Not only do I do custom design and development, but I also work for an amazing theme company, Headway Themes. I can say for the first time in my life that I’m completely happy with what I’m doing for a job. I’m making enough money to pay my bills and have a little financial freedom. I plan to continue this post in a part two where I will talk about how I came find Headway Themes, why I ended up picking that as a theme I was going to invest my time in, and how I started to work for Headway Themes. So stay tuned for another post this week.

Photo Credit Neighya

It may come to a shock to some readers here that I am no longer going to be posting about some things on this blog. I’ve taken on a role with Headway Themes that has me blogging more both on the official Headway blog and now over at Headway Hub.

Because of this, I’ve decided to stop blogging about WordPress and code here. I’m hoping to focus more on what it is like to start freelancing, what tools I’m using to help along the way, and other things about the startups culture. So if you were coming here for WordPress or Headway related posts, make sure to check out Headway Hub where I’m blogging more about WordPress and Headway items. I’m actually starting a series this week on getting into freelance web design/development. So be sure to check that out.

I have been working from home for 38 days. A lot of things have happened in this time.

I started it all by heading to Kansas to work with Grant and Clay on Headway Themes 3.0 and got a lot done! The team is very excited to get version 3 out the door. You can keep up with the latest updates on it over at the Headway Themes blog.

I’ve had a huge influx in client work since starting to freelance full-time. So much that I’m currently booked about a month in advance! I have had to learn to deal with people getting upset with me (and some quite upset) when I can’t put them ahead of others that have been waiting. Something that wears my patience at times.

I’ve traveled to Toronto for a conference to speak at about Headway. I’ve done at least 3 WordPress User Group meetings via Skype/GoToMeeting to talk about Headway 3.0, and will be speaking at a local user group at the end of the month.

I’m keeping busy. I love it! Can’t wait to see what month 2 brings!

This week has flown by! It’s already Friday of my first week out here at the Headway World Headquarters, and we’ve made tons of progress! We’ve pushed out a survey to the community, an important bug fix release (which included several security fixes as well as big hitting features the community loves). We’re also working on the next major version of Headway, which I can finally say will be 3.0. We’ve been roughly working on this since January (maybe even a little before!) and are almost to a point of being able to get a beta out into developer customers hands. Clay has been pounding away at this release and still get out new features and bug fixes throughout the year as we’ve needed it. It’s a very exciting time here at Headway and I’m super excited that Clay and Grant have brought me on.

This week has been filled with Headway related things, whether it’s working with the guys on Headway things, or emailing and working with clients to get their sites up and going so that can get to making money with their businesses. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job as fun as this! I can’t wait to see what the next couple of months bring me!!

Speaking of next couple of months…Are you in need of some WordPress work done? I’m currently scheduling clients for September and October. If you or someone you know is looking for some WordPress work, or are looking to create a new site, Contact me over at my business site, SurfCubes. You can also check out the services page to see what types of things I’m currently offering. And if that wasn’t enough, I’ll be announcing a deal for the last couple of weeks in August and ALL of September to get you started with your own site. Be on the lookout for that soon!

Here’s what I’m going to try for the next 30 days:

• No soda
• No Zune/Apple/Charter movie rentals
• Take a picture every day and post to blog
• Eat a piece of fruit a day

The question is, what are you going to try for the next 30 days? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

SurfCubes

With SurfCubes I’m going to be working on promoting my business and continuing to work with local small businesses and others from around the world to help them with all their WordPress site needs. I’ll be continuing to be a leader in providing custom development for Headway Themes, but will use whatever tool is best for the job.

Headway Themes

I will continue to be working at Headway Themes. As it stands now, I’m providing support, training, developing and testing. The good news is that this transition will offer for more training opportunities like webinars during the day! We’ll be announcing more details soon over at the Headway blog. So stayed tuned over there as we get ready to offer more training and announce other cool things we’ve got in store.

Finally I just want to thank you to everyone around me that’s been supporting me in this decision. I’ve spent a lot of time debating and thinking about this decision and I look forward to helping more people out in the coming months with all there WordPress needs. If you know anyone looking to hire a WordPress freelancer, make sure to send them my way!