Lee Jackson is an enthusiastic WordPress developer. He loves to code, and he is the buzz for quite the time when WordPress laid its initial foundations. He mostly caters coding services for designers and design based websites and love to attend WordCamps. Highly social and integrated with the right people in the community, Lee Jackson is looking forward to building more credible relationships in the coming future. Next year, he will be attending Matt’s address on “State of the Word.” Learn more about him and his secrets in his interview at Cloudways.
Cloudways: Lee Jackson, it’s great to have you here with us today. Please tell our readers a bit about yourself? When did you start using WordPress and why did you choose WordPress as a permanent CMS platform for your business?
Lee Jackson: Thanks for having me at Cloudways. I feel super excited. Well, I am a web developer who runs a WordPress agency in the United Kingdom that builds WordPress websites for designers and design agencies.
I got into WordPress pretty much when it first evolved from B2. I had been struggling to build sites with PHPNuke, and the WordPress interface was the polar opposite. It is super easy to use and understand. Now and again, I tried a different CMS only to come back to WordPress because of the huge ecosystem it has out there.
Cloudways: Have you attended any WordCamp events? If yes then what do you think how these WordCamp meetups help the WordPress community?
Lee Jackson: Unfortunately not, but I have sponsored the London event in one of my previous companies. Where we are based there are not many WordCamps nearby, however, we plan to travel America next year, so we want to visit the big one and enjoy Matt’s “State of the Word” address.
I do think WordCamps are super valuable to help build up relationships with people. By far, however, I’ve been lucky in being able to build up strong connections in the WordPress community from my chair here in Wellingborough. (I’ve also put on a few pounds…. 🙁
Cloudways: Tell our readers a bit about your experience as a theme & plugin developer, what plugins and themes would you like to share with our readers?
Lee Jackson: We have niched right down into building the designs of others into WordPress themes. This means we are usually under a strict NDA (contract) so we cannot share the work we do in most cases. Design agencies, web designers, and designers often have a lot of work going on and need to be able to hand off their PSD designs to an agency like mine for us to code and deliver the site.
It is a win win for us as we get provided amazing designs from awesome agencies all around the world, and we then get to do what we love the most and code for it.
I’ve personally been coding since I was a young boy in BASIC, and my web career really took off in college where I began building websites at lunch time back in 1998…. I have learned a lot since then, and I am pretty proud to say that our code has powered 1000s of websites over the years
Cloudways: I was going through your blogs in leejacksondev.com, and I was wondering whether writing is one of your hobbies. I was also curious why haven’t you posted anything on the 9th of May 2016?
Lee Jackson: I do post now and then, I find writing super easy, but I do a podcast that takes a lot of time up, and I have found we get much more engagement as a business through providing valuable content through audio that people can consume easier than the written word. We have our prospective clients listening to us while they run, drive and cook the dinner. It is an amazing way to grow an audience. Therefore, I have blogged a bit more since May now, but it is only when there is something burning in my brain! I want to commit to paper. Blogging is quite therapeutic there.
Cloudways: I have been visiting your website for quite some while, and I have seen that you are more into podcasting your interviews. In my experience, written questionnaires are more beneficial because chances of listening are more likely less as compared to reading. But all in all, I would like your perception on the thought. Is conducting the interview through a podcast a better option? If so, they why?
Lee Jackson: Well, I totally disagree with you of course. And I have tens of thousands of downloads of our podcasts and a thriving Facebook group that says audio is a brilliant way to engage your target audience 🙂
Put it this way…. I am a lazy reader. I look at a page with more than 500 words, and unless I am SUPER interested in the topic, I will likely move on. However, if there were an audio version, I’d pop that on without thinking and go for a run.
Cloudways: I see, you have been working for a long time in the WordPress community, and you have quite a showcase of clients, would you like to share your experience with us? Share one of your favorite website that you have made recently for any of your clients?
Lee Jackson: Due to NDA’s restrictions, I can’t share any of that… And I want to soo badly because we have worked with some HUGE names… for instance ARG 🙂
Cloudways: Who do you consider among your best buddies within the WordPress Community?
Lee Jackson: Here is a list of few names that are close to me within the WordPress community.
Kim Doyal
Jon Perez
Josh Pollock
David Waumsley
Nathan Wrigley
Bob WP
Jan Koch
John Locke
Jonathan Denwood
Cloudways: Everybody needs to have some time off from work to relax. What do you do in your free time to unwind yourself? Are you fond of traveling? Which is your most favorite place to travel?
Lee Jackson: I love to visit a village in England that is about 150 miles from here called Haworth. I and my girls drive up and stay in a cottage in the area and spend time walking, visiting local beauty spots, eating out and getting to know the locals. It is a beautiful place, and you can have a 10000% chill time over there.
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 you before?
Lee Jackson: I do believe that cheap shared hosting is not the way to go when building a corporate website so I would always recommend people invest in a slightly more expensive, robust and specialist platform such as WPEngine, Cloudways, etc. I have never had the pleasure of trying Cloudways personally. See wpengine alternative
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Finally, just for our readers, can you please send us an image of what your desk or workspace look like! 🙂
Lee Jackson: My desk at the Wellingborough office. In all fairness, my office is my Mac. I pretty much work anywhere 🙂
Thanks for the interview!
Thank you!
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]
