Today, we’re chatting with Susan Daniero, the founder and president of the CMS Advertising Group. They provide full-service WordPress design and development for a number of amazing WordPress sites. Susan started the CMS Ad Group in 2009 to specialize in WordPress sites for the government, universities, healthcare companies, SMBs, and the like in the Washington, DC area.
Susan and her team are WordCamp veterans as well, and continue to sponsor the events, including sponsoring the upcoming WordCamp Boston. As a company, they value close client relationships and going the extra mile in customer service. Their results speak for themselves.
In Susan’s Own Words:
I had managed many website projects at the companies where I had worked and loved the process and project management. So I set out on my own to build a creative/web agency. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have assembled a great team of talented designers, developers, and strategists that love what they do.
Now onto Susan’s answers!
When was the first time that you really got excited about WordPress and at what point did you decide to make it your career?
We started building sites with WordPress in 2008, but really got excited about it as a CMS with the June, 2010 release of WP 3.0.
Where do you go first to get your WP news, insights, and updates?
The WordPress Codex and Twitter. We follow a variety of WP experts, unicorns, etc. Mark Jaquith, Chris Coyier, Stephanie Leary, Bill Dennen, Dan Mall, Brad Frost, etc.
What WP consultants deserve more love than they get? Who should we be paying attention to?
Shout-out alert: Our team would be at the top of my list with Deven Cao, our Creative Director, Chris and Mike, our Master Designers, Rebecca and Sarah, our web strategists, and Tom, Bill, Aaron, and Sam our WordPress Developers. In addition, Stephanie “the real deal” Leary, author of WordPress for Web Developers: An Introduction for Web Professionals. We saw her speak at WordCamp Austin and San Francisco this year.
What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?
- Host with WPEngine!
- Use image sprites when possible
- Read the changelog before updating plugins. If the developer is vague, diff the code yourself.
- Use a secondary DNS provider
Confess to us your biggest moment of WP fail?
We previously hosted our client sites on a service provider that will remain nameless. Easter Weekend a few years ago was hell as we had to migrate 61 WordPress client sites in two days due to data center issues. Ouch.
This was BWPE, (Before WP Engine) 🙂
If you were going to spend this weekend creating a plugin that doesn’t exist, what would it be?
A plugin that assists users with creating and modifying accessible (WCAG 2.0) HTML tables.
Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?
Depending on the level of required customization we create our own from scratch or use StudioPress’ Genesis framework as the parent for custom child themes.
What’s your favorite theme or theme framework? Why?
#1 Custom themes we have built in-house. #2 StudioPress’ Genesis framework. Its default markup is logical and provides a good starting point for many of our clients’ sites. Customizations can be done via Genesis’ multitude of action hooks.
Favorite plugin?
We have a few favorites: Gravity Forms, WordPress SEO, Event Calendar and ECPro by Modern Tribe
Least favorite plugin?
Any plugin with low ratings and/or poorly written code.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Custom Post Types?
The coolest thing we’ve done is help our clients better manage their content in a dead simple way. It used to be a real mess trying to use categories or tags to organize vastly different content types. Custom post types are such a simple concept but really revolutionized what we could do with WordPress.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that WordPress consultants will face in 2013?
At CMS, we’re particularly excited about the upcoming admin interface changes (ie. MP6 project) and the move to make WordPress more of an Application Development platform, in addition to a CMS.
If you could change one thing today about WordPress, what would it be?
Clean-up the markup and CSS of the admin to make it easier for developers and theme developers to integrate with WordPress’ styles. Custom admin functionality shouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. This is a good start but it needs some work.
Where do you see WordPress going in the next 2-3 years?
We think WordPress will evolve to be used more like a web application framework.
Tell us a story where you saved the WordPress day for yourself or on a client project. What made the difference for you?
A DC law firm client approached us that had a WordPress site that was experiencing instability and security issues.
We performed triage on the current site to stabilize it (It was a plugin rodeo). We then rebuilt the site from the ground up using WordPress best practices and cleaned up the design and typography. In addition we installed and customized the WPML plugin for both Japanese and Korean multi language support.
Upon completion, two of my staff visited the client and trained their internal staff on the WordPress dashboard, and content and image edits and updates. That made for quite a happy client
What’s the biggest misconception you encounter about WordPress, and how do you clear it up for your clients?
That it is only for blogs.
If you were interviewing another WordPress developer for a job, what is the first question you would ask and why?
Code review. I want to see what’s inside their GitHub or Bitbucket account? Seeing what work they have done previously is a great way to see how they think and approach problems. It gives significantly more insight than a resume.
What did I miss? Here’s your chance to fill in the blanks and add something you want people to know about you!
We are a silver sponsor for WordCamp Boston 2013.
Thanks Susan!
Hop on over to check out the CMS Advertising Group‘s work and see if they are a good fit for your upcoming projects!
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