Discovering Professional WordPress Consultants and Services
You have big plans for your blog, and your time is valuable. Hiring a professional to handle the back-end design and maintenance of your blog enables you to spend your time creating the content and building your readership on the front end.
Many bloggers who decide to go the custom route by hiring a design professional do it for another reason: They want the designs/themes of their blogs to be unique. Free themes are nice, but you run the risk that your blog will look like hundreds of other blogs out there.
A brand, a term often used in advertising and marketing, refers to the recognizable identity of a product — in this case, your blog. Having a unique brand or design for your site sets yours apart from the rest. If your blog has a custom look, people will associate that look with you. You can accomplish branding with a single logo or an entire layout and color scheme of your choosing.
Many consultants and design professionals put themselves up for hire. Who are these people? We get to that topic in just a second. First, you want to understand what services they offer, which can help you decide whether hiring a professional is the solution for you.
Here are some of the many services available:
- Custom graphic design and CSS styling for your blog
- Custom templates
- WordPress plugin installation and integration
- Custom WordPress plugins
- WordPress software installation on your Web server
- Upgrades of the WordPress software
- Web hosting and domain registration services
- Search engine optimization and site marketing
Some bloggers take advantage of the full array of services provided, whereas others use only a handful. The important thing to remember is that you aren't alone. Help is available for you and your blog.
Table 4-1 pairs the three types of blog experts — designers, developers, and consultants — with the services they typically offer.
Many of these folks are freelancers with self-imposed titles, but we've matched titles to typical duties. Keep in mind that some of these professionals wear all these hats; others specialize in only one area.
Table 4-1 Types of WordPress Professionals
| Title | Services |
| Designers | These folks excel in graphic design, CSS, and the development of custom WordPress themes. |
| Developers | These guys and gals are code monkeys. Some of them don't know a stitch about design; however, they can provide you custom code to make your blog do things you never thought possible. Usually, you'll find these people releasing plugins in their spare time for the WordPress community to use free. |
| Consultants | If you're blogging for a business, these folks can provide you a marketing plan for your blog or a plan for using your blog to reach clients and colleagues in your field. Many of these consultants also provide search engine optimization to help your domain reach high ranks in search engines. |
We wish we could tell you what you could expect to pay for any of these services, but the truth is the levels of expertise — and expense — vary wildly. We see services range from $5 per hour to $300 per hour — and all points in between and beyond. As with any purchase, do your research, and make an informed decision before you buy. That advice is the absolute best we can give.
Listing all the professionals who provide WordPress services is impossible, but we do list some of the most popular ones in Tables 4-2 through 4-4. Our goal is to cover a diverse level of services so that you have the knowledge to make an informed decision about which professional to choose.
WordPress designers
WordPress designers can take a simple blog and turn it into something dynamic, beautiful, and exciting. These people are experts in the graphic design, CSS styling, and template tagging needed to create a unique theme for your Web site. Often, WordPress designers are skilled in installing and upgrading WordPress software and plugins; sometimes, they're even skilled in creating custom PHP or plugins. These folks are the ones you want to contact when you're looking for someone to create a nice, unique design for your Web site that is an individual, visual extension of you or your company, such as my own Premium WordPress theme business shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2: The design of E.Web-scapes premium WordPress themes site.
Some blog designers post their rates on their Web sites because they offer design packages, whereas other designers quote projects on a case-by-case basis because every project is unique. When you're searching for a designer, if the prices aren't displayed on the site, just drop the designer an e-mail and ask for an estimate. Armed with this information, you can do a little comparison shopping while you search for just the right designer.
The designers and design studios listed in Table 4-2 represent a range of styles, pricing, services, and experience. All of them excel in creating custom WordPress blogs and Web sites. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it's a nice starting point.
Table 4-2 Established WordPress Designers
| Who They Are | Where You Can Find Them |
| Blueprint Design Studio | http://blueprintds.com |
| Convertiv | http://convertiv.com |
| E.Webscapes - Lisa Sabin-Wilson | http://ewebscapes.com |
| Lamplight Media | http://www.lamplightmedia.net |
| Pixelita Designs | http://pixelita.com |
| Web Dev Studios | http://webdevstudios.com |
Developers
The WordPress motto sits at the bottom of the WordPress home page:
Code is poetry.
No one knows this better than the extremely talented blog developers in the core WordPress development team. A developer can take some of the underlying code, make a little magic happen between PHP and the MySQL database that stores the content of your blog, and create a dynamic display of that content for you. Most likely, you'll contact a developer when you want to do something with your blog that's a little out of the ordinary and you can't find a plugin that does the trick.
If you've gone through all the available WordPress plugins and still can't find the exact function that you want your WordPress blog to perform, contact one of these folks. Explain what you need. The developer can tell you whether it can be done, whether she is available to do it, and how much it will cost (don't forget that part!). You may recognize some of the names in Table 4-3 as developers/authors of some popular WordPress plugins.
Table 4-3 Established WordPress Developers
| Who They Are | Where You Can Find Them |
| Crowd Favorite | http://crowdfavorite.net/wordpress |
| eHermits Inc | http://ehermitsinc.com |
| Mark Jaquith | http://coveredwebservices.com |
| Pluginize | http://ewebscapes.com/pluginize |
| Voce Communications | http://vocecommunications.com |
Consultants
Blog consultants may not be able to design or code for you, but they're probably connected to people who can. Consultants can help you achieve your goals for your blog in terms of online visibility, marketing plans, and search engine optimization. Most of these folks can help you find out how to make money with your blog and connect you with various advertising programs. Quite honestly, you can do what blog consultants do by investing just a little time and research in these areas. As with design and coding, however, figuring everything out and then implementing it takes time. Sometimes, it's easier — and more cost effective — to hire a professional rather than do it yourself.
Who hires blog consultants? Typically, a business that wants to incorporate a blog into its existing Web site or a business that already has a blog but wants help taking it to the next level. Table 4-4 lists some people and organizations that offer this kind of consulting.
Table 4-4 Established Blog Consultants
