Recently I worked with Nick Davis to produce the makeover of Ideabook.com. I did the design, Nick did the hard stuff.
I set out with two goals, first to consolidate three sites into one: Ideabook.com (my design website), Pageplane.com (my blog), and Jumpola.com (my big list of links) under Ideabook.com. And second, to streamline the user experience and make the site friendly for phones and tablets.
Now that we’re up and running, I want to ask you a personal favor: Please don’t hire Nick Davis to develop a WordPress website.
Why? Because it seems that every time I find a talented website developer, we do a couple of jobs together and, bingo, they experience some form of a weird, spontaneous combustion of white-hot success.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim any credit for it, it just seems that, because I do my homework about whom I hire, others do the same and hire MY developers to do THEIR websites. Call it a carefully engineered conspiracy (by you-know-who) or simple bad luck—I seem to choose the very moment just before said developer is sucked up into a vortex of affluence and influence.
Sadly, with Nick, it may already be too late. His experience as one of the BBC’s first online journalists, his management of a large UK airport website, and his leadership of a team of web developers and designers for a publishing company prepared him well for his current occupations as the founder of ThemeValet (a WordPress theme setup and support service), as the author of a well-read newsletter for the WordPress Genesis community, and for working with clients the world over.
It is all quite troubling. Now that I see how easy he is to work with, how responsive he is to requests, how much he knows about UI/UX, design, and WordPress—I fear the worst.
Thoughts?