Finely Tuned Consultant: John Housholder

I think that John looks like Jack Johnson in this Picture

This week’s Finely Tuned WordPress consultant is John Housholder. 

John is the President of Ah So LLC (@ahsodesigns), a Nashville based WordPress Design and Development company.  Ah So focuses on WordPress plugin, responsive design, and ecommerce development platforms that community driven and user-focused.  John is also a web professor at a local college, runs the Nashville WordPress Meetup and WordCamp, and is a conference speaker on a responsive design and e-commerce.

John also owns a dog named Dunn who he named after his favorite country singer, Ronnie Dunn, and enjoys brewing beer in his backyard.  He sucks at making rice.

John’s answers to my growing list of questions….

When was the first time that you really got excited about WordPress and at what point did you decide to make it your career?  

I was working as a senior account manager at Dell computers and doing web programming on the side.  One day, I got a call from a large political campaign who had seen some of my work and wanted to talk.  I went in, gave a pitch and won the account. I then had to decide if I wanted to have a secure job in corporate America, or go out on my own and form a company based solely on an open source platform.  I chose the latter and haven’t regretted…..for too many days, that is.

Where do you go first to get your WP news, insights, and updates?

Smashing Magazine: mainly for designs ideas.
WP Beginner: for cool ideas of ways to use WordPress.
WP Candy: for information on the WordPress community.

Which WP consultants deserve more love than they get?  Who should we be paying attention to?

David Hollander at www.sparkweb.net  He’s a great ecommerce plugin developer who has been working with us on the development of some of our larger sites such as the Aaron Rodgers Store.

What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?

The first thing Dell taught storage and server sales representatives was to ask the question “How safe and secure a company’s data?”  If your site gets a virus, what happens?  If someone steals your computer, do you lose all your files?  If you install a bad plugin and your site goes down, how easy is it to restore to before you made the mistake?  It’s the same with WordPress and web development.  My first project I had to move around three GoDaddy servers thus losing tons of actual work time.  We all need a hosting service that can grow as we grow.  We need to be able to push buttons, or make phone calls to our hosting providers to get more space and speed, not move, reconfigure, and reboot servers.

I also ask my customers why they are paying me to create them a site if they don’t care what happens to it three months from now.  One of the biggest hurdles I face regarding client relationships is getting them to understand the value in backing up/securing their own site, just as they would their work computers or family photos. No one thinks about these things until it’s too late and it’s our job to help them think about these issues before a crisis occurs.

Confess to us your biggest moment of WP fail?

I had a major site launch for a pro baseball player.  Just so you know, pro athletes, just like businesses, want things done yesterday.  It was a large e-commerce store which had hit the Twitterverse so we had to put up a splash page plugin so customers could not order while we were putting on the finishing touches.  A day later, we then finished coding the site and were ready to launch.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out how to delete or deactivate the “coming soon” page.  We tried everything from deleting the plugin, to restoring from a backup, and nothing worked!  The tweets had been scheduled and we could see through Google Analytics that around 1,000 people were hitting the site every minute!  My phone was ringing off the hook asking me why no one could order products.  Then, it hit me.  We were making all the changes on our development server, not the live server.  Ooooops.  #Fail

Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?

Both, we often use the Genesis Framework, but are starting to develop our own e-commerce themes using FoxyCart and Foxyshop.  This is going to be an awesome solution for developers which will stylishly streamline the ecommerce checkout process. Our new site will launch in a few months at http://www.foxy-themes.com.

What’s your favorite theme or them framework? Why?

Genesis by StudioPress is my favorite framework.  It was the first one I really dove into because of their support forum.  I now recommend Genesis to our local WordPress MeetUp and teach a class on developing child themes within the Genesis framework at a local college.

What is your favorite plugin?

Image Widget.  It’s so simple and makes our workflow faster.

What about your least favorite plugin?

I abhor plugins that refuse to rely on all the tools WordPress has available. I loathe plugins that refuse to enqueue scripts and styles properly.  As a result, we have started making our own.  Stay tuned. Some really cool free releases from us will be out soon!

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Custom Post Types?

Employer/Employee custom post types which may not be super “cool”, but it saves time and looks great!

What do you think is the biggest challenge that WP consultants will face in 2012?

Overcoming the misconception that WordPress is still a blogging platform.  With the release of 3.0 and custom post types, WordPress is much more powerful than anyone ever thought it would be just a year ago, but I still believe the overall community is being hurt by “developer” hacks that don’t take care of their customer’s needs.

If you could change one thing today about WP, what would it be?

Dashboard.  I get more calls about the Dashboard erasing code in the HTML view than anything else.  Not sure why this happens, but for such a simple task that every user uses on a daily basis, it can be really frustrating.

Where do you see WordPress going in the next 2-3 years?

I see WordPress becoming more and more a fully customizable mobile CMS.  There is such a huge opportunity for mobile.  In 5-10 years the world will almost all be operating within the virtual cloud and WordPress will play a major role in this transformation.  I’m sure everyone says this, but WordPress mobile is not where it needs to be.  At the current state, WordPress mobile content creation is clunky and hardly stable.  Other platforms like Tumblr are a lot easier to use for simple quick and easy content creation.

Tell us a story where you saved the WP day for yourself or on a client project.  What made the difference for you?

I’m not sure “save the day” is the correct term, but rather “save the project” for WordPress.  We received a project for a community driven site for troops returning home from war from a company who had been working on a project with a local WP developer.  The project was going way outside the original scope and sequence so the developer told the client that the project could not be completed in the WordPress platform.  The client then went and got a quote for Drupal which was not going to have all the features and cost around 60,000!  The company then called us.  In the end, we were able to achieve the goals of the project and even add more features which fit into the client’s budget.  A great win for WordPress and our troops!

Is there something about the WordPress community at large that gets on your nerves?  

They don’t take WordPress professionally.  Yes, WordPress is fun and you can create really cool and great sites with it, but it is also a product and products should be treated professionally.  By this I mean that they don’t answer emails or commit to issues.  My business gets a lot of business from WordPress designers and developers who haven’t finished projects or have stopped communicating with their clients.  In my opinion, this is unprofessional and goes against my argument to business owners that WordPress designers and developers are the best in the business.

What’s the biggest misconception you encounter about WordPress, and how do you clear it up for your clients?

WordPress is just a blogging platform.  I then point out that large sites such as Sony, Wired, CNN, Ben and Jerry, GE and Rackspace use WordPress to power their sites.  I also mention when I was at SXSW Interactive last year in the WordPress talk, a lady from Dell asked when WordPress was ready to power their community sites and Matt said today.  WordPress is no longer a blogging platform!

If you were interviewing another WordPress developer for a job, what is the first question you would ask and why?

The Question — Do you let WordPress do most of the heavy lifting in your development, or do you like to roll your own solutions? 

The Why — The more I learn about WordPress, the more tools I discover WordPress has available to make life easier, and more “future-proof” for developers. For example, the HTTP API, what a freaking awesome concept! Yet, we continually run across plugins that build raw cURL requests. If you follow the WP Tracs, you can see that any issues folks may have had with custom header implementation have been dealt with and built into the class. Save yourself some time and go open source! You can’t beat it. Make yourself better by utilizing what’s available within the framework you’re utilizing. Of course, there’s a time and place for implementing your own solutions, but check and see what WordPress has to offer first. One more example, I see a lot of plugins that have fun and exciting regexes for validating email addresses. Granted that’s a fun Google search copy paste, or WordPress has an internal function for validating emails called is_email().  Once again, use it and abuse it!

What did I miss?  Here’s your chance to fill in the blanks and add something you want people to know about you!

Man, I love working in WordPress.  I love the community.  I love attending, organizing, and speaking at everything Word-oriented.  I love the fact that people from different cultures from around the world have united to create a platform that allows for ideas to be shared with the world.  I love that I’m a small part of this movement and can work towards making the world a better place for everyone one day at a time.

Thanks John!
You can check out John’s work at www.AhSoDesigns.com.  He may be able to help you on your next WordPress project.