Expanding Our Network of Skilled WordPress Developers
This past year I’ve come to the conclusion that our business, Kessler Freedman, Inc., needs to network more aggressively and more successfully with similar organizations as ours in the WordPress website space.
Why is that? We’ve been happy as a small web shop, cultivating long-term clients over time that we work with to evolve their online efforts for changes in their organization and goals, technology, user patterns, and the online environment. What’s the need?
We think we’re going to need more resources, particularly WordPress resources. The pandemic and resulting economy has done a few things to the world of web development: it has reduced many budgets which has slowed down the evolution that would have occurred over the past year. That budget reduction and resulting version of technical debt will, in my estimation, show up in two ways:
- A lot of web sites are going to want a lot of work done; and yet concurrently,
- A lot of “client” web developers are going to be gone or reduced as they had to move on to a different employer during the pandemic recession.
This is going to lead to the big getting bigger and the small getting overwhelmed.
Why We Want to Connect With WordPress Experts
Now, there are lots of different kinds of clients that a web developer can work for. We are a client of many web software developers, for example. We, on the other hand, are an entity web developer – we build web sites for entities, such as associations, government, nonprofits, small business, etc. We network with many of the web software developers that we are clients of, and we are invested in the development and success of their software… but for the purposes of ourselves and our clients. Our business model is to make our “entity clients” better on the web in all ways.
We used to go to live WordCamps and network there. There is usually a very interesting mix at the WordCamps – software/hardware vendors, folks like us, folks like our clients, dabblers, and a rich speaker environment. But live WordCamps are pretty limited right now. And we’re definitely niche networkers – not necessarily looking for local WordPress folks, but the kinds of folks that have done enough work with associations, nonprofits, government – our type of client base. Location isn’t really that important as long as it’s not a 12 hour time zone difference. Language, of course, is.
Who We’re Looking For
We are looking for WordPress folks to work with that have some good experience in the same markets we do. We have spent 25 years building relationships with a variety of clients and partners, and our experience has been good for us. We’re not looking to increase our “employer” relationships at this point, but we’re looking to expand our network for reasonable contract work. We’re looking for good folks that do good work in a reasonable time and understand set revenue projects – we have some flexibility in pricing with our clients but we do set the project price as defined upon contract. Billable hours are estimated in advance.
So, if you’re comfortable and feel you are proficient at the following areas:
- Gutenberg
- LearnDash
- Multisite environment
- WordPress maintenance and security
and you’re looking for a longer term working relationship, we should talk. These are continuing to expand as growth areas for us. Shoot me an email through the contact form. I will follow up. In the meantime, we’ll be checking out WordPress outsourcing companies and other subcontractor opportunities as well.
PS – We lean against trying to network on LinkedIn with the folks that send me a cold contact request. Just seems like so much spam – and not particularly believable – accounts there.