My Journey and Travels with WordPress
I love WordPress!…
For many years I opened and operated Irish pubs for investors across Europe – it was lots of fun, it was also exhausting! I was itching to do something that wasn’t so physically demanding and very restricting on my time.
The Journey Begins
I began to learn WordPress. WordPress gave me the freedom I was craving. After a couple of years playing with it I began to build sites for other people, eventually leaving the hospitality industry to build websites.
Back then I had recently moved from Bruges in Belgium to Brittany region of France where I’d bought an old granite 4 story house built in 1860 to renovate. I was asked by a local French / English association if I would run some in person workshops for some of their members. These people who wanted to build and maintain a simple website themselves.
Most attendees were English speaking Ex Pats from start-up businesses with tiny budgets. Some were French speakers, from local French sports teams and associations, who were wanting to create an information point for their clubs. The clubs and associations had even less budget
I agreed to run a pilot workshop, which I called ‘Build a Simple Website by Teatime Today’ to see how things went. The uptake was for the first workshop was phenomenal. We were limited by room capacity and safe power points to 25 participants.
All slots were taken in under 24 hours. A few days later the association got in touch again saying, “We know you said lets run a pilot and take things from there” however we have had another 43 people enquiring so we have opened a waiting list.”
“Ooooh la la” I said “I’d better work on my presentation skills!”
Being A Teacher
It was the first of many WordPress workshops over the three years that I lived in Brittany, I regularly presented to several organisations and associations and I really enjoyed it.
As a happy accident, it was also the start of me offering website hosting and maintenance too. Initially this was offering very low cost shared hosting space on my server for the workshop participants giving each their own Cpanel. Domains were obtained for each participant prior to the workshops in their own names and I created their hosting accounts prior to the workshops too again with their prior consent. I had also asked each participant to prepare initial pages texts, images and logos if they had one saved in a file on their laptops ready for the workshop.
Each workshop began with a quick peak at Cpanel for the purpose of creating an email account and to load WordPress on to the domain using Fantastico – remember Fantastico? Fantastico was superseded by Softaculous and for people people with very little tech experience, wanting to build a website DIY [as a do it yourself project] it offered an easier route than loading WordPress via FTP.
From there we covered logging into their WordPress dashboards loading a theme, adding pages adding content to the pages including logo and images from the participants pre prepared folders.
For the ease of the workshop we all used the same theme. It was the beginning of the participants WordPress journey. I was delighted;- all of them had a thirst for more in depth learning as a result more workshops followed. Within a couple of years I was super busy again feeling my time was not my own again!
Moving On
Working with WordPress meant I could work from anywhere as long as I had an internet connection.
It was time for another adventure! This time relocating from France to England where my partner Simon, an international touring musician, and I lived on a narrowboat. I spent several years traveling with the band when they toured, mostly taking photos and keeping the tour bus spic and span! With a regular job that wouldn’t have been possible.
In January 2017, after a very busy 2016, we took a quick spur of the moment holiday to Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands, seeking snow! We extended our trip by a week, then another week and then decided we wanted to stay, and stay we did! We took a 6 month Winter let on a holiday cottage, popping off on tour from our new location. Towards the end of the 6 months, we found a cottage on the edge of Strathgarve Forest between Ullapool and Inverness and moved in between tour dates.
It’s a stunning, extremely rural location and we love it. Here I have an office in our cottage which benefits from superfast broadband despite our very rural location. After over 30 years of touring Simon trying his best to retire from life on the road.
I have a bunch of clients that keep me as busy as I want to be, some of whom I have worked with for many years, some are new to me since coming to Scotland.
I have been lucky in that lovely clients seem to find me, through word of mouth really. I don’t advertise and I haven’t had the capacity to take on new clients for some time. I really don’t want to expand which may seem strange to many. I have no interest in taking on employees, I have been there and done that in my pub life days. These days I like an easy life enabling me to enjoy where I live and indulging my passion for open spaces and photography.
WordPress has an amazing community around the World, it has brought so many opportunities and so many friendships into my life from all around the world. I love the collaboration.
Giving Back
Just last week I was on a Zoom call with a group hosted from the USA. Nathan, the guy hosting the call said to me, ” Hey Sadie, I saw a photograph on display at WordCamp USA last week that you’d taken. Did you know about that?”
Truth was I didn’t. Nathan said “I’ll email it to you I took a photo of your photo!”
The next morning I received an email from Nathan and attached was his photo of my photo in a frame with my name and a QR code attached. It was a Fly Agaric photo which I had taken and submitted as a creative commons contribution to the WordPress Photo Directory which is part of the Make WordPress project. I read an article a few weeks ago which was all about getting involved in the WordPress community for the growth and benefit of the community and the future of WordPress.
“Five for the Future’ which is an initiative promoting the WordPress community’s contribution to the platform’s growth. It’s an open source project, WordPress is created by a diverse collection of people from around the world. The purpose of the project is to encourages organisations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development.
Next I read about the Make WordPress initiative and loved everything about it. There are lots of ways for WordPress advocates to get involved and give something back to the fantastic community that WordPress is.
The Photo Directory grabbed my attention because I am a prolific snapper!! I immediately began to submitting photographs. All photos are submitted to the WordPress Photo Directory are submitted on the basis that they are gifted in to the public domain for anyone to use, anywhere, for any purpose, without the need for attribution. I recently join the Photos team as a moderator too.
Whilst WordPress hasn’t made me a millionaire yet! It has given me a wealth opportunity, freedom, and some fabulous friendships. WordPress is a huge part of my life. I love WordPress!
