Following on from last week’s post about working on-site more, another conscious decision I’ve made this year is to focus on front-end work and to do less WordPress jobs.
I love working with WordPress but I love HTML/CSS/JavaScript more and working on larger more complicated front-end builds built by top designers is just more appealing than WordPress jobs for smaller agencies with smaller clients.
This means I have taken down my services page and replaced it with a simple rates page in the main menu of this site. I’ve also taken down the section that talks small-business owners through the process of web development/hiring a web developer. It also means I’ve had to backdate my portfolio to ensure all my recent front-end projects are displayed at the forefront – something I’ve been too busy to do in the past three months.
Why now?
Last year, I was doing a lot of WordPress jobs and I was enjoying them but then quite a few of them started taking longer than expected or became unnecessarily complicated. This is not a problem with WordPress per se or even back-end development; it’s more with the type of client I was working with: doing the development work and trying to manage projects is very very difficult, they’re two distinct jobs requiring full concentration and I’ve found over the last year that taking on profitable jobs for smaller agencies has been significantly less profitable.
Towards the end of 2012, after a very stressful 3-6 months I took on some traditional front-end work and I actually loved it. And I remembered how I used to love web development and I realised that I’d have to start doing this type of work more often.
Summary
I’ll still do WordPress as and when a small CMS job is needed but no more customisation; no more client areas or forums. Just front-end jobs that require a half a day’s extra work to WordPressise it – and that’s it.
I feel very liberated by this, by removing all mention of WordPress and any other services from my site this means I’ll hopefully receive less enquiries from people wanting me to modify their $50 theme which they want turned into an enterprise business.