James George started his journey of success in the WordPress world with Creative Beacon.com. He writes about WordPress and other design and development materials on www.creativebeacon.com and was inspired by other successful bloggers who were earning $20k+ from ad revenue. Although challenges are tough in the web industry, he continues to defy the odds and has made his blog a successful place to potentially earn from by attracting a large number of readers.
Cloudways: James, it’s great to have you here with us today. You have a lot of experience in technical writing. Can you tell our readers how you began in the field and your work related interests?
James: Honestly, it began when I started Creative Beacon. I saw that other blog owners were generating 20K per month in ad revenue from their site, so I set out to try and do the same thing. From there, it started to grow quickly. I started as a traditional graphic designer and moved into being more focused on web design and WordPress.
Cloudways: You are the founder of Creative Beacon which provides design & web related tutorials. What challenges did you face when embarking upon this venture?
James:Â I had my fair share of challenges (and still do). The biggest challenge was growing an audience. Once I wrote a tutorial, I had to figure out how to spread the word that it was available. Once I figured that out, I knew I could replicate the process again and again.
Cloudways: You’re a successful Designer & Developer as well as a technical writer. What would you suggest to newbies who choose this field as a career? What was your motivation to start your career as a Designer & a Developer?
James: My advice would be to practice and practice and practice. You only get good by actually doing it. There’s a lot of time to invest, but the investment pays off. Believe me. I used to have a day job that only paid me $13 per hour. My biggest motivation was to try to provide a good life for my children. $13 an hour doesn’t do that.  Now I own my own business, and the revenue difference is like night and day.
My best advice I would give to newbies, other than practicing, would be to learn a variety of different ways to accomplish things, but also, to focus on one area and get really really good at it. For example, if your main focus is getting good with WordPress, you’ll want to get good at PHP, WordPress hooks, and MySQL databases. If you can learn how to manipulate and store data and you combine that with strong WordPress design skills, traditional web design skills (HTML and CSS) and PHP, you’ll be unstoppable.
Cloudways: There are a lot of CMSs in the market. When did you discover WordPress and what were the reasons to choose WordPress for your website?
James: I chose WordPress because I loved how many plugins were available. It seemed to me like you could do anything with a WordPress site, and fairly easily, too. You could build a killer photo gallery, an eCommerce store, a content aggregation site, a user-submitted content site, and anything else you could imagine. You could also take existing plugins, and if you knew what you were doing, you could bend them to your will to do anything you wanted. Also, there’s a huge market for plugin and theme development out there, and it just seemed like the way to go.
Cloudways: Have you ever attended a WordCamp event? What other WordPress & designing events have you been a part of? How do you think these events benefit the Community?
James: I haven’t attended any of these events, mainly because my business is so busy. It’s hard to break away for a few days because of my rigorous schedule. I am a lone wolf, and kind of a one-man army, so I don’t really have anyone to hand my work over to while I go to an event. However, I would love to speak at one of those events if I ever had the opportunity. These events are essential to the WordPress community because they bring like-minded developers and designers together under one roof to come together, solve problems and move the WordPress movement forward. I would love to be more involved, and I will one day when I decide to grow, adding staff members to my team.
Cloudways: Who do you consider your best buddies to hang out with in the WordPress Community? Who do you think WordPress beginners should follow and learn from?
James: I don’t really have any buddies when it comes to the community. Like I said, I am kind of a lone wolf when it comes to my business. However, if you’re looking for communities to follow in the WordPress community, I would suggest WP Shout, Cats Who Code, and WPMUDev are the places I would go. Plus, any big WordPress theme developers would be a good place to go, too. Check out Elegant Themes, Themefuse, MyThemeShop, ThemeIsle, etc.
Cloudways: I saw your tremendous portfolio. Can you tell our readers your favorite website that you have created so far? Can you recommend your favorite WordPress theme or plugins to our viewers?
James:Â Picking my favorite is a tough one because I work so personally with all of my clients to create a site especially crafted to their business. I would have to say that I love the site I created for friauflaw.com, and I also love the site I created for moreflightsmoreplaces.com, which I created for ricklaneymarketing.com. When it comes to themes and plugins, I have a laundry list of regulars I use. I kind of have a special setup I use, which enables me to build literally any type of website you can imagine.
Cloudways: Everybody needs to have some time off from work and relax. What do you do in your free time to unwind yourself?
James: I like to hang out with my two kids because I am kind of a big kid myself. However, for the biggest stress-relief, I would say that playing a good hack-and-slash video game does the trick. It’s a great way to blow off some steam after a long day, when it’s quiet in the house, and everyone has gone to bed.
Cloudways: WordPress is being used on bigger projects and handles a lot of requests and visitors. Would it be better to refer platforms that specialize in providing WordPress hosting such as Cloudways? Have you tried Cloudways’ hosting offer yourself before? Would you care to give it a try?
James:Well, if you really know what you’re doing, you can get by on regular shared hosting, but if you want the best performance, I would agree that specialized WordPress hosting would be the best. I’ve never tried Cloudways, but I’d be glad to put it through its paces and see how it performs. One thing I’ve learned is this; Never close your mind to any options until you’re sure of the results.
Cloudways: Just to humor our readers, can you please send us an image of what your desk or workspace look like? 🙂
James:Â Sure, I literally stood up, took a few steps back and snapped a pic with my phone. Here it is. I picked up a U-shaped desk a few months back, and I got a killer deal. I literally have my dream workspace!
Danish Ashrafi
Danish was a WordPress Community Expert at Cloudways - A Managed WordPress Hosting Platform. He loves helping out WordPress beginners and solving their problems. His passions takes up his free time as well and he spends time designing, developing and learning new stuff. You can email him at [email protected]
