Thought Leader Thursday – Neil Matthews

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | May 21st, 2009

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Neil. You’ve been working with PHP & MySQL for quite a long time and recently started working heavily with WordPress. Your blog, WP Dude, has really been taking off. What brought you to the IT industry, and what motivated you to eventually shift to your chosen niche of specializing in Wordpress?

I have been working in corporate IT for years now, I went straight into IT from college. The last five or six have years have been in Internet facing systems. I went freelance, again in corporate IT, but the culture of big business IT left me cold. I was into blogging and developed a couple of sites (since flipped or left to die) about a couple of topics, and it occurred to me that I could develop a business supplying services to blog owners. The rest is history, I have been developing WP dude for about six months now, I finished my last corporate gig in April and I am now full time into this new business, it is still in a start-up phase but I am loving every minute.

I like to write, deep down I want to be a writer rather than a techie so the combination of writing about and providing a technical service are ideal fits for my skills and things I enjoy.

I am a bit of a blogging evangelist, I just love the fact anyone can create a blog (for free on Blogger or wordpress.org) and write their stuff. There are no editors to say no to the content. Much of it is very poor, but there is some excellent stuff out there making people think, stuff which would never match an advertisers profile and get published otherwise. My RSS reader is crammed full of quirky blogs I love the medium.

You’ve been offering WordPress consulting for people who are somewhat technical and just need assistance with specific tasks. Would your consulting services also be appropriate for someone who is less technical? What is the benefit in hiring you instead of just slugging through the support forums?

I think my benefit is that some people just don’t have time or inclination to wade through the forums. They may spend hour upon hour searching for a solution, struggling technically to implement the solution and the time they have spent is time lost in their core business when they could have hired me. I provide solutions to people who just want to get on with blogging and creating content.

An analogy I would use is a plumber, I could read the DIY manual, then buy the tools, then change the shower head. But it would be a quicker neater job to bring in a plumber for an hour.

I’ll assume that you probably hear a lot of the same questions over and over. What are some of the more common misunderstandings or misconceptions about WordPress?

Trying to get over the concept of a trackbacks or pingbacks still send my head spinning, the other thing people struggle to get their head around is the concept of a page versus a post on WordPress.

I think WordPress is extremely powerful, both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. Right out of the box, it’s pretty SEO friendly, easy to set up and use, and there is a plugin available to accomplish just about any task one can imagine. Is there a situation you can think of where it wouldn’t be an ideal choice? 

In my opinion It is not that good for e-commerce, I know there are a couple of plugins to add products and shopping carts to a WordPress blog, but I am not too sure about them, but would love to hear of a success story. When you are searching for a products you know what you want, you type in red widget size 12 to Google and you expect a product page with a price. You don’t want to wade through blog content to get to the item you want.

A solution such as Shopify, Magneto or even an e-bay store is better than a WordPress blog with an e-commerce function in my opinion.

There are thousands of plugins, and many of them do the same thing, so separating the proverbial wheat from the chafe can be tough for a WP novice. Some of our top picks are All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, What Would Seth Godin Do, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You’re the resident WP expert; what plugins do you think people need to be using?

I use all the ones you mention, a could to add to your list are backup plugins, I use two, one for the database backup and the other to backup what I think of as the code base, the WordPress files, your uploaded images etc. They are Wordpress backup, and WordPress database backup.

The other thing I would recommend to everyone is the security scanner plugin, a fantastic utility which does a penetration test of your blog security and then provides a report of the weaknesses

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