I had good decent grades in my college. While I was on my conquest to become a hardcore techie, my colleagues started freelancing in WordPress. Well, they didn’t have as good grades as mine, they started making money way before me. From there, words started floating that anybody can do WP. It’s easy. It’s simple. Just download the themes and plugins from hundreds of thousands of options and handover the integration to your client. Easy money, right? Unfortunately, I believed in that.
Later, while diving deeper (and in social media also), I found that the same misconception was in the community also. People treat WP developers as low-end devs working in the easiest tech. Yes, it’s just plugins download, drag-and-drop, and you have a digital identity on the web! I started doubting about my work at some point. Am I doing it right? Am I, who always wanted to be a hardcore techie, who now works on the “easiest” tech is heading in right direction?
People generally ignore the effort put by all the themes, plugins and core developers that made a platform so huge yet so easy to use. WordPress has one of the largest community, still growing like a startup with a flaming hot idea, powering 28% of the web (when I started, it was 27%). WP development is not just drag-and-drop. It’s contributing to the huge codebase behind those functionalities that empowers one to quickly set up an entire running business within an hour! (I won’t talk about the cost. You know that.)
I work for a client, an eCommerce application, that has a revenue of more than a million per annum (obviously, we’re talking dollars). It uses WooCommerce, add-ons and many more custom features built over it. Matt (I used his first name, but he doesn’t know me… yet) started WordPress as a blogging platform. It’s now a giant Content Management System running thousands of businesses.