If you are looking for a jack of all trades and a master of WordPress, Wes Chyrchel of 3GC Interactive is your man. We are very excited to see your reaction to his talk on Responsive Web Design With WordPress.
With that said, here’s today’s Speaker Spotlight:
How long have you been working with WordPress and what first attracted you to it?
I have been working with WordPress since early 2006. On a recommendation, I redesigned my company site, TSWinternet.com with WordPress and was obsessed. It was a developers dream. It was modular enough that you could build full-featured websites, while at the same time, get into the code and customize it the way you wanted. I was blown away. I was first told about WordPress by a friend of mine, my mentor really, as I struggled to maintain my own home-grown CMS. He kept telling me to try it, so when it was time to redesign my company website, I gave it a shot. A couple of years later after trying several CMS’ I decided to develop exclusively using WordPress. I have built over 50 sites with WordPress. Financially and creatively it’s been the best decision I have ever made.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole, including WordCamps?
I am a big fan of community and I instruct all of my clients to get out there and “shake hands and kiss babies.” You can’t design and grow in a vacuum, so it’s absolutely essential to the success of your business that you get out there and share and meet people. I believe with the open source nature of WordPress, you are obligated to share. It’s how you give and get. The WordPress community thrives on these practices and in turn the WordPress software is the best software on the planet for building websites, period.
WordCamps are brilliant! They are self-created franchises that are supported by Automattic and are equal in my mind to the Apple retail store. They have been an essential building component in the dissemination and popularization of the WordPress software. Everyone wins, developers get to learn from their colleagues, Automattic sells more services and new interest keeps the momentum of the software development going.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
I have about 30 different RSS feeds I follow daily, but developers that inspire me include, Justin Tadlock, Mark Jaquith, Otto, Joost de Valk, Alex King, Jason Briggs and others. I also follow A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, Mashable, Nettuts, 5by5 and several others. I’ll sometimes search Twitter for WordPress articles people have written or look around google. I’m usually looking for someone who had the “Aha” moment and felt compelled to document it. Once found, it’s in the bookmarks. I spend a lot of time every day reading and staying up to date.
What is the most exciting feature/addition/improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?
I believe by far the biggest improvement to WordPress lately has been the menus option under the Appearance menu. This new feature has made creating menus much, much easier. I would like to see a “wp_list_pages” sort of functionality for the “wp_nav_menu” function however. Combining links, pages and categories, under one area was a huge time saver.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
More and more people are pushing the boundaries of WordPress. Essentially WordPress is it’s own framework/platform and what will be more common in the future will be fully dedicated applications built on top of WordPress. For some applications this may seem underkill, but remember, we’ve been through this before, it was just a few years ago people were shocked we wanted to build websites using “blog software.”
