This post has been a long time coming! If you’ve known me for a while on social or from this site, you’ll know I have published similar posts before :) I have tried reviving this blog a couple times in the past and circumstances just prevented me from putting time into it. But the thing is, this site has never been my only focus anyway and I’ve never made a real effort to monetize it. But I’ve never “neglected” it as long as I have in the last 3 years. Yes, my last published post here was in June 2014. That IS a long time! But I want that to change…

What happened since then is that I partnered with someone to grow my freelancing business into a small agency and increase revenue and my capability to help clients. That has taken up a lot of my time. But, as our team is growing, I no longer have to do all the work myself. My partner is an awesome graphic designer and artistic director so I rarely do design anymore. Also, we have a distributed team with a content manager, a Web integrator and developer as well as 2 other graphic and web designers now.

So I can concentrate on the stuff I always preferred like strategy, UX and information architecture as well as meeting our awesome clients. I also love the problem solving aspects of the early stages of a project. Testing solutions like WordPress plugins, code snippets and the like to meet a client challenge. That is where I thrive. I also love running the business and getting more into marketing and trying to multiply our revenue streams (we have a couple projects non related to client services coming soon…)

This is all going very well but, as I said, it has taken up a lot of my time in the last 3 years. So, unfortunately, this site just became much less of a priority and other things including starting to play music again have taken up both my work and free time.

But I miss writing, blogging and expressing my opinions on the Web business in general but particularly the WordPress ecosystem. The last 3 years have been eventful for WordPress and I want to talk about some of that stuff here. But I also know my readers liked that I talked mostly shop and provided reviews, technical articles and detailed information about the tools I use and you may be using or thinking about using yourself. I want to post more of that too. More reviews and some tutorials. I want to leverage video too as writing tutorials has always taken me a long time. For WordPress stuff, I think video is more the way to go.

So, following that, I would appreciate if you could comment below about what you would like me to cover. I will talk about the stuff I use like Genesis and Beaver Builder and more. But I also want to cover more workflow related topics. Like, one of the specialized skills I have developed working with WordPress since 2009 is leveraging the multisite feature for different applications. Especially using multisite for building bilingual sites as we’ve worked mostly for Canadian clients so far. I strongly dislike most if not all of the usual multilingual plugins and just find multisite cleaner for that application. This is just one topic.

If this or any other WordPress or Web design & development related topics interest you and you would like more practical information, comment below and stay tuned for more information.

It starts tomorrow as I have already completed the 4th installment in my “State of my WordPress Toolset: Themes” article which I’ll publish tomorrow. That will give you an idea of where my head has been on the topic of themes and where I and my agency are going with our theme usage for our client sites. Because the one thing to keep in mind about this site here since I’ve been using WordPress and for the future is that, all my articles and reviews and whatever is coming in the future is based on the mindset of a small branding and WordPress agency serving all types and sizes of clients and businesses. My WordPress and other tools choice are always made in that mindset in order to serve our clients the best we can. So that’s why I sometimes strongly disagree with popular recommendations for WordPress themes and plugins. They rarely take the long term viability of a product into account. I do.

Finally, the one other topic I’ll start talking about is hosting. That has been a real pain point for me in the last few years and I’ll try to share some hard lessons I’ve learned on choosing and working with hosting providers.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. More on all that coming soon! Thanks for hanging in with me, coming back or coming at all if you just discovered this site. I really do my best to provide useful, actionable information.

Thank you and see you again soon!