Go to the profile of Jamie Powell
Jamie Powell
FrontEnd Web Developer and Designer. Art Enthusiast.

The Five Figure WordPress Site

This talk at Abstractions hit home. Why? Well, I work with the CMS everyday, yet there is so much more I have to learn. Lara Schenck, walked atendees through her process of making a five figure WordPress site. A fan fact about Lara, not Laura, is that she’s the founder and CEO of Laura Schenck LLC. Thus, I am the founder and CEO of Jamie Powell LLC, in which also goes by the name of Jamie Powell HBIC LLC.

Lara should us how to make a super customized site that “you can charge lots of money for. Timber and Advanced Custom Fields for the win.” Yay! She introduced us to Twig, a PHP template for WordPress. Twig compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. She also introduced us to Timber, which helps you create WordPress themes. After sharing the tools that she uses to create customized sites, she talked about her process, and process, in my opinion is king.

Process, not product people. First she does some content mapping. During this stage she is asking clients 900 million questions, because why not? Next, she starts building in the back-end and gives access to the client so they can add content. TIP: Block staging sites from web crawlers. She introduced us to ACF Pro, a plugin for WordPress that acts as a GUI layer for custom fields. Next, she talks about migrating data from another site using WP Migrate DB Pro and using GIT to push and pull your code. Something in her process which was new to me is using style tiles for designing the front-end. She also uses a CSS compiler, which I have not done yet, but so darn eager to!

Next, she talked about lessons learned from working with clients.

  1. If the client can mess up the site, they will, assuming they have access to the staging site.
  2. Environments get confusing.
  3. Performance is important.
  4. Pick your battles, swallow your pride.

The takeaway? “You are charging for an experience, the website is a bonus.” In other words, create a beautiful, custom and functional site and get that dough.

Here’s a link to the slide: Slides bit.do/abstractions