Decided to only use WordPress for client sites

Wil Brown

Today we are going to conduct the interview of Wil Brown from Sydney, Australia. He is a WordPress Consultant, Business Mentor, Developer, Conference Speaker, and Organizer too. He is also an owner of a WordPress consultancy company known as Zero Point Development. In the interview, he had shared his experience in WordPress and the tools he uses.

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• WordPress.org Profile

About Wil Brown

I’m Wil, and I’m a Dad / WordPress Consultant / Developer / Business Mentor / Conference Speaker and Organiser, living in Sydney, Australia.

I am the owner of Zero Point Development, a WordPress consultancy company and WP Wingman a WordPress site care company.

My passion is back-end development and being a business mentor to others.

I’m happiest developing and working with plugins, APIs, payment gateways and membership sites.

In my spare time, I help organise the WordPress Sydney meetup group, WordCamp Sydney, WP Australia and I am an active member of Linux Australia.

You’ll probably bump into me speaking at a meetup group or other tech conferences across Australia.

I occasionally have time for a glass of red wine and a spicy meal.

Q. How did you come into your current field? Share a bit of the background?

Ans: I’ve always been interested in programming since a neighbour got a Commodore Vic-20 for his Christmas. While they enjoyed playing games, I was reading through the BASIC programming manual that came with it and hacking into games to give me extra lives and the top scores.

Fast-forward a few years and with a degree in Computer Science I decided to go into business for myself in 2005 and by 2008 I had decided to only use WordPress for client sites.

Q. What’s the most interesting project you have done to date in WordPress?

Ans:I do a lot of consulting for big clients and most projects are covered by a NDA so I can’t disclose actual project details, however, a recent project has been writing a middle-ware application to syndicate centrally stored data to WordPress in Gutenberg blocks. I’ve learned a lot about the blocks and the block editor as a result.

Q. Have you ever been to any WordPress meetups or WordCamps? If yes did you learn anything useful?

Ans:I co-organise the WordPress Sydney meetup group, WordCamp Sydney and I’m a Linux Australia sub-committee member for WP Australia which helps all the groups and WordCamps in Australia reach the community.

Even though I’m an organiser, I learn new stuff at WordCamps because ther are always people there more cleaver than me.

One of the best things about WordCamps is networking with the community.

Q. What kind of tools/software do you currently use for your creations?

Ans:I use PHPStorm as my main IDE, git for my version control with public projects on GitHub and private client repos on bitbucket. I have my own server stack of Nginx, MariaDB and PHP 7 running as Windows 10 services, however, sometimes I use Local by Flywheel. I like to use Yarn as my php package manager and npm for JavaScript

Q. What interesting feature do you think you would like to see in WordPress and is currently missing?

Ans:Definitely a new media manager. Being able to group media by taxonimy and specify a location for specific files would be fantastic.

Q. Out of the current plugins and themes which one do you like the most and why?

Ans:I’ve been using Elementor and Beaver Builder for most client projects over the last year or so, using their default base themes, Beaver Themer and Hello Elementor.

If I had to use a bought theme I would likely go with GeneratePress as it’s lightweight and very well maintained.

Q. Which WordPress hosting do you use and would you recommend for your clients and others?

Ans:My main site runs on Kinsta – they have a super-fast stack and premium DNS. Some of my other sites are on Wordify.com – those guys are fantastic at support and they offer free staging sites which I use for client work. Otherwise, I fall back on Digital Ocean droplets for custom work.

Q. What does your workstation look like?

Ans:I’m a desktop guy and I’ve just built myself a new 8-core AMD Threadripper unit which is ideal for editing 4K videos.

Q. Do you like/love what you currently do in WordPress?

Ans:I’m my own boss and I can choose the types of clients I want to work with. That’s all because of WordPress, so yes, I love what I do.

Q. What would you like to do in the future in the current field or somewhere else?

Ans:I feel myself transitioning more to business mentoring, trainning and coaching. Running a business is easy but running a successful profitable business takes a lot of work and I’ve got a lot of experience I’d like to share.

Q. Can you give us some reference for whom we should conduct an interview next and why?

Ans:Interview Cath Hughes from Phase Creative https://phasecreative.com.au/ Her journey in the WordPress world has been very interesting.