#150 – Andrew Palmer on His Challenges and Successes in the WordPress Community

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast, from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case facing up to the challenges and successes of being in the WordPress community.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Andrew Palmer.

Andrew’s journey with WordPress started almost two decades ago, after transitioning from Joomla. He went on to make significant strides in the community, co-founding Elegant Marketplace, and investing in ventures like Atarim and Bertha AI.

In this episode, we talk about the intricacies of working within the WordPress ecosystem, comparing the free and commercial sides. Andrew shares his thoughts on the challenges of financially compensating event contributors, and the importance of non-financial contributions, such as time.

He discusses the absence of a structured regulatory body in the web development industry, and how he thinks this can impact trust and credibility.

We discuss the lack of industry wide accreditation in web development, and the controversial nature of establishing such systems within the ever-evolving WordPress environment.

We hear about his personal and business achievements, such as guiding clients to grow their recurring income, sharing successes in SEO, and the positive experiences of community events like meetups and WordCamps.

As we explore his thoughts on contribution expectations, and financial struggles of freelancers, Andrew also touches on the changing nature of the industry with the rise of AI solutions, and the longterm utility of WordPress.

Andrew’s reflections on his long career, his plans to pivot towards personal interests, and his intention to remain partially involved in the community, lead to a fun conversation which all seems to boil down to perseverance in a rapidly changing industry.

If you’ve ever thought about the complexities and commercial dynamics of the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Andrew Palmer.

I am joined on the podcast today by Andrew Palmer. Hello, Andrew.

[00:03:22] Andrew Palmer: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. We tried to do this podcast a week ago, but despite the fact that everything was ready to go, we just talked for about an hour, and so hopefully this time around we’ve actually hit the record button.

Andrew Palmer’s joining us today from the UK, and we’re going to talk about his life story in WordPress, and the fact that that story in WordPress is going to be coming to an end fairly soon.

Andrew, anybody that doesn’t know you, would you just give us your little potted bio. We’ll explore that in more depth, but just give us the two minute elevator pitch, if you like, of Andrew Palmer’s life.

[00:03:55] Andrew Palmer: Probably about 30 seconds. Started in WordPress 20 years ago, maybe 18, by accident. Was a Joomla guy. Went into WordPress by a guy called Mark Copeman, who doesn’t speak to me anymore and I don’t understand why, maybe it was the 30,000 questions I asked. I just got lucky, I suppose.

My SEO skillset grew over time. I had a CD printing company and a printing company at the time, we were number one in Google. Which was probably easier 18 years ago, let’s face it.

And then I got into products, Elegant Marketplace. Six of us got together, ended up three of us, then two of us, then one of us, for various reasons. Elegant Marketplace sold that to InMotion for silly money, still going. I’ve got nothing to do with it now. It’s been five years.

Spent all that money on investing in different things like Atarim. I’m an investor in Atarim. Very small shareholder now because big guys like Yoast and some guys from 123 Reg, or ex 123 reg have invested in that as well. Done a few good things there.

Bertha AI started that with Vito, he had to back off a couple of years ago, so we’ve been going three years with that. Vito is concentrating on Atarim, which is a collaboration software, which we’re all very proud of because it was WP Feedback, and now it’s Atarim and does every website, you know, you can go onto every website, not just WordPress.

Still got Bertha AI, still got a, well, I’m closing my agency actually, my web agency, which is part of this story. Getting off social media and just having a rest from the web world and web dev, continuing with my maintenance and that’s it really. That’s what I do. I’m Andrew Palmer.

[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: If you don’t mind me asking, Andrew, and I don’t want to know your age, but I do want to know, are you at that time of life where closing things down and having a more restful experience is the order of the day, or are you just going to carry on working but in a different arena outside of tech, outside of WordPress?

[00:05:46] Andrew Palmer: Well, I don’t mind my age because I do pretty well on it really. I’m 64. 65 in May next year. So missed out on retirement, I’m getting my pension at 65, by a month because of governments, the way they dilly dally and have different shenanigans around pensions.

And my pension really is my work, so after having invested a load of money, lost a load of money, invested a load of money again, lost a load of money, and made some money, and all this kind of stuff, it’s been a bit of a nice roller coaster, gradual roller coaster. Nothing great heights or great depths.

But the web dev world has changed immensely. So I’m just going to be doing something else. And whether or not I come back to the web dev world or not is anybody’s guess. Somebody said, I’ll never leave it the other day, and same person said, my finger isn’t on the pulse as much as I think it is. And maybe that’s true. So maybe I need to go away, think about what I want to do with my life. Do some stuff that I really do want to do, which is catering. I love catering. It’s in my DNA.

Had a couple of restaurants, and pizza places, and coffee shops and stuff, and I just enjoy that. I enjoy real customer interfacing, except people that order a particular kind of coffee, it’s called a dirty espresso or something. It’s bit of chocolate in it, it’s horrible. But it’s hard work to make. You just think, oh, and you got to clean everything down. It’s just like, really? Just have a coffee.

[00:07:07] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think that working in the technology sector is a young person’s game? And by that, I’m looking back on my life and I’m thinking that it all seemed a lot easier when I was younger. I am in my fifties, and definitely my capacity to learn new things is, it’s not what it once was.

My drive and obviously available time, you know, in my case I have a family and that really does consume free time. And a lot of the learning that I did around web dev and technology was done in the evenings when I had free time and all of that. But you said no to that initially, you don’t think it is. You think that any age is available, and you can be effective, and innovative, and all of that despite your age.

[00:07:48] Andrew Palmer: I really do think, well, with age comes experience, you know, bracket, mistakes. What I try and do, because I’ve got a little bit of coaching thing on the side. My aim actually is in February I start a counseling course, a proper counseling course for people with bereavement, or partnership issues, or business issues, or the whole personal sort of stuff. But you have to be, in the UK, you have to have some qualifications for that. So I need to go out and get the qualifications.

I’ve been coaching for a while actually, and every single one of my coaching clients without exception said, you should really just get into counseling because you are not a business coach in the true sense of the word. Yes, you’ve helped my business, but you’ve also helped me emotionally and stuff like that. And walked me off ledges. And encouraged me. And told me my pros, and told me my cons. And without any, because I don’t hold anything, but actually, no, Nathan, you and I have a private conversations so you know I don’t hold anything back.

I think honesty is part of coaching, honesty in business. And I think currently I’ve got some situations in web dev world where I don’t think particular people, and or companies, are being particularly honest about the way they, one, promote their products, treat their customers, pricing, price gouging and all this kind of stuff.

So I’m a bit sad that the web development world, certainly the WordPress world that I’m observing is not, or hasn’t got as much integrity as it did have a few years ago when there were less products out there.

We’re overloaded by products. AI products. Forms, I mean, how many forms are out there? And they’re all trying to compete with each other, and do comparisons, and get involved in Twitter spats and all this kind of stuff. I’m just not interested in it anymore. I’m interested in being honest about what we’re able to give people for a price, and being honest about giving good support.

[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think that the WordPress space during your time in it, you said 18, 20 years, I mean really it’s the full span of WordPress, more or less. Do you think that it has changed then for the worse? I have not been in it for anything like that length of time. I’m more like the 10 year mark, the 9, 10 year mark. And when I joined WordPress, commercial products were already, they were the norm. You could go out and buy this, that, and the other thing.

But my understanding, reading Milestones, the history of WordPress, tells me that it started just like most open source projects do, as a sort of fairly philanthropic endeavor. And then people realised that it was popular and they were able to build their products on top of it, and sell those products and what have you. There always seems to be this tension between the commercial side of WordPress and the contributor side of WordPress, let’s call it that. So my question very simply is, do you think it’s got, air quotes, worse?

[00:10:31] Andrew Palmer: Yes. Oh, definitely. And also, from the contributor perspective as well, there’s been some awesome contributors to the system, and one particular plugin developer that I know very well was giving away all of his plugins. And of course I come along and say, why are you giving them away? And it took me 18 months to get him onto the Elegant Marketplace that I had, and within six months he’d earn $150,000 from a $10 plugin.

It’s easy to get slightly over enthusiastic about it, you know, and it was a lifetime license for $10 and stuff. And then support just got a bit overwhelming, and then the idea of subscriptions came in, because if you want support, you’ve got to pay for a subscription.

But certainly on the WordPress repository, there’s some gamification going on, there’s SEO shenanigans and lots of products are cross marketing each other. And I don’t think that was the idea for the repository, really. It was just literally a repository for free plugins. Here’s a free plugin, this will help make WordPress operate better. You’ve got a nice form plugin like, for instance, Contact Form 7 has never, you’ve never had to pay for it. And it’s got millions upon millions of downloads. But other people have made money out of Contact Form 7 by doing add-ons to them to make it easier to use.

We know form people very well, Gravity Forms, WS Form. Mark does a great job with WS Form. You’ve got WP Ninja guys doing forms. There’s a new form came out last week, so there’s competition there, which is always good. That’s the whole point of the world really is, competition should drive prices down. But unfortunately I think it’s driving quality down, or quality of service, because there’s a price point that people are willing to pay in WordPress and that’s being tested, let’s say.

There’s a lot of people out there saying, okay, you can have a lifetime deal. I’ve got a lifetime deal on Bertha, you know. But some people take it up, some people don’t. If you’re selling a plugin for more than $10 a month it’s kind of, that’s a lot of money.

So yeah, the competition and the way that people are marketing things these days within WordPress, and other places, we’ve got people with the Aldi, Marks and Spencer’s argument over a cake. You copied my cake, and all that kind of stuff.

So competition begets resentment as well, and also increases toxicity because, let’s give an example of say, page builders. If you’re a Divi user, you love Divi. If you’re not a Divi user, and you look at another Divi user, you think they’re an idiot. If you’re a Bricks user, why would anybody else not want to use Bricks? You’re an idiot if you don’t use it. Or if you are a particular plugin user, and another plugin does very similar things, you’re an idiot if you don’t use this one. You know, all this kind of stuff. There’s just a level of toxicity that I can live without.

[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: So has this toxicity as you describe it, has that promoted you to leave in advance of when you might have chosen to? In other words, have you become fed up with what’s going on inside WordPress plugins, themes, community, whatever you want to call it?

Has it pushed you to make a decision ahead of how you might have done, I don’t know if, let’s say for example, five years ago you were thinking you’d probably go on into your seventies or something, but now you are thinking of retiring, in inverted commas, a little bit earlier?

[00:13:39] Andrew Palmer: I don’t think so. I think, you know, I’d always kind of aimed for 65 to retire from the web development work, because it’s actually not easy developing websites. Especially these days with all the AI solutions, and I’m guilty of that. You know, we brought out Bertha three years ago. Doesn’t build websites, but you’ve got lovely things like ZipWP, you’ve got Kadence WP, building AI, you’ve got GoDaddy with their own AI solutions now.

ZipWP have just announced that there’s a hosting opportunity, white label. So all hosts, literally all web hosts for WordPress, will have an AI build opportunity built in, and very competitive. If you look at the pricing of ZipWP for host, it’s crazy competitive.

So even if you are a reseller, or you are using WHM or whatever to be a host on the back of another host, you can install ZipWP and for 90 bucks a month, you can offer an opportunity for people to build a thousand websites on ZipWP. I think that’s an incredible opportunity. And it’s not complete websites. You still have to finish them off and put your own design situations in. But really, for mom and pop shops it’s a perfect solution. It’s an unbelievably good solution, just like Kadence WP.

So it’s harder to get good web development jobs, or web design jobs, which I’ve never been a web designer. You know, if you look at some of the web designs that I’ve done, how’s he survived? But I’m more backend really. I’ve got a team of developers that are unbelievably good at coding, so there’s never been a situation that they can’t address really, which is really cool.

[00:15:07] Nathan Wrigley: When you look back at your career then, what have been some of the highlights over that time? And I really am interested in going back the full 18, 20 years because there may very well be bits that weren’t necessarily all that significant at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, you think, oh gosh, that really did steer me in a different direction, and change things for me. So let’s go back and spend a few minutes just thinking of the bits that you’ve enjoyed the most.

[00:15:34] Andrew Palmer: Oh, it’s going to sound kind of weird, but helping people. I mean, I’ve helped a lot of people make a lot of money in WordPress. I’ve had one guy introduced him to another guy, and he sold his plugin for a hundred grand, and then got 15 grand a month for two years to develop it further.

I’ve helped developers earn a lot of money, and grow, and develop lots of plugins. I mean, one guy, probably over the span of four years of being on Elegant Marketplace, probably earned a million bucks in a four year period. I helped WP Feedback massively. Within 31 days, they had a year’s worth of money to work with.

But it’s all persuasion. I mean, you know, to get WP Feedback into Elegant Marketplace, I was literally driving a mini helping this guy move offices, and stealing a couple of screens off him when he was moving offices. I’m in my little mini convertible and I’m saying, okay, you want to sell your plugin on your own website, nobody knows where you are. You’ve got a thousand people in an email address, I’ve got 63,000 email addresses.

You either want to sell it on the corner shop or you want to go to the supermarket. And with a supermarket, you are going to lose some of your margin. So what? But at least you’re going to get out there. And I think we sold 200 grands worth or so in a month. Not bad. So that’s a proud moment.

I mean, helping grow Termageddon, we did a marketing campaign with Termageddon, I think we got them a thousand customers in just over two weeks. So that’s nice to know that, and we got rewarded for it as well. We got paid for that as well, commissions and all kinds of stuff and great friendships were built over that.

As an individual, I’ve met a lot of lovely people, you included, amazing, and kept them as friends. People message me all the time saying, how are you doing, and what’s going on?

And through Bertha, I just did a thing today, which is what I love doing. You know, there’s a particular user that’s really loved Bertha, and used Bertha from day one and carried on with it, and she’s paid loads of money into it. She paid the first high premium prices, and then she’s reduced down to the monthly, and then got an annual for whatever, and then she said, oh, do you know what? I’ve been paying for Bertha for about six months twice, I’ve been paying for it twice. I said, oh dear, well we’re beyond our free refund period because it’s going to cost me money to refund you, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll just cancel all payments for the future, and I’ve gifted you a lifetime of Bertha.

The email I got back was amazing. It’s nice to be able to do those kind of things for people that have supported you as well. Speaking at WP London, speaking at Bristol Meetup, my first meetup that I ever spoke at, that was amazing.

Building websites for businesses, you know, I built a website for a business, he was in Magento, he was turning over 20 grand a month. I persuaded him to move to Shopify of all things, on the golf course, just saying, why don’t you just move to Shopify? Here’s the price. He didn’t like it, but there you go, that’s him. You know, within a year, he’d turned over two and a half million quid. So that’s nice.

And it sounds as though it’s all about money, but it means he’s improved his life, and built up the business and it’s still continuing to grow. So it’s basically helping people grow businesses, you know, coaching clients. One person came to me, she was recurring income of about 700 a month and knew exactly what to do, but just couldn’t get the incentive to do that. Now she’s on like 10, 15 grand a month recurring income.

So guiding people through their journeys. Writing references for people so that they, true references as well, saying, yeah, this person’s good at that, she may not be good at that, or he may not be good at that. Them ending up getting a 200,000 a year job out of it. Hopefully that my reference helped as well. Because it’s a genuine reference. You know, after coaching people, you kind of know people pretty well.

One of the greatest things that I did was I had a CD printing company and I learned about SEO. We were number one under CD printing in the UK. One guy got in touch with us and the job was for £365. It was a thousand CDs, and we printed them in our little inkjet printer and everything. His next order was for £365,000. That was quite an achievement. I mean it’s just, everybody talks about 10 x-ing, not hundred x-ing, or whatever it is.

And it does sound as though it’s all about money, but also the nice side about being involved in WordPress is the Meetups, the WordCamps, the traveling, the getting to play golf with Victor Drover for nine holes when I had a bad back, and it was too hot, and I was a bit sweary. All those kind of things.

You know, meeting Victor Drover from, he’s got this lovely thing called watchful.net, which is similar to Blog Vault, but hasn’t got the backups and all that kind of stuff, or ManageWP. And he’s just a great guy. And he was partners with a guy, Steve Burge, who’s got PublishPress now, and they’re just cool guys.

And they were in the Joomla community first of all, and they’ve transitioned across to WordPress because it’s just bigger now. Mike Demo, he was at InMotion, we made friends because he approached me for a coffee in Berlin WordCamp, said, do you want to sell Elegant Marketplace? And it was about three years previously, we’d been going two years and I said, no, no, no. And then in Berlin, I just thought, you know what, we are near our five year thing, in a year’s time we’ll be five years old. These things normally take about a year. And we sold it on the 31st of December that year from a coffee meeting with him and a guy called Tim, who’s a lovely guy as well. On the 31st of December 2019, so how was that for timing.

[00:20:47] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like the bit that’s underlying is the interface of business and community in a way. And although you took pains there to point out that it sounds like it’s all about the money, in the community, that is a legitimate part of it, right? And I know that for some people, the whole topic of the finance and money and all of that is, it’s not something they want to engage with. They want to contribute their spare time and the business side of it is of less interest to them.

Whereas other people like you, it’s different, right? You have a business, you want to be profitable. Ultimately, that is what the business is for, is to generate revenue, and pay the staff, and increase the product roadmap, and the share of the market that you’ve got and all of that. And I think that’s really interesting.

But it’s nice that you’ve also got the community angle thrown around it as well. In that all of the bits and pieces that you’ve mentioned are not just your own, but other people’s successes. And I’ve definitely seen you in person lots and lots of times, and you show up to all those different kind of events as well. So that’s nice.

[00:21:42] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, I think one of the things that really does annoy me about WordPress is that contributors have to go cap in hand. And I’m talking about contributors from speakers at WordCamps, to Meetups, to various events that people organise in WordPress. Really talented developers who are contributors for whatever reason to WordPress. It’s good for them because they get a little badge, they can sell themselves to other people and say, look, I’m actually a Core contributor to WordPress, so I know more about WordPress and this other person, you should employ me, and also I contribute to WordPress. So kudos to me.

And that’s great but then there’s always a donate button, and there’s always a, I can’t make it to WordCamp because I can’t afford it. Because you can afford the ticket price, because that’s always been Matt’s aim to keep it under a hundred bucks or something. I think WordCamp New York was the most expensive, wasn’t it? A hundred dollars or something? It was the first time it reached a hundred dollars. Mostly it’s sort of been, I remember when it was 20 bucks. It’s great. It’s just a cursory kind of commitment to pay 20 bucks because I want to make sure you come. But it’s the travel, the hotels, specifically in America, they’re so expensive, hotels in America.

So a WordCamp, to make it worth going to a WordCamp, you need to get there two days before to acclimatise to where you are. And there’s various Meetups, you know, all these hosting companies put on their big events and stuff to try and attract you to them. So you’re talking a few grand, maybe two or three grand to raise to go to a big WordCamp. One of the four bigs the Asia, I mean, Asia from UK is like 15 hours.

I would love to get rid of the cap in hand mentality of WordPress. I’m doing this for free, can you donate? Can you help me contribute more to Core? That shouldn’t be a thing as far as I’m concerned. If you are contributing to something that has a commercial end game, which is WordPress, and or Joomla, and or Drupal, because people are using it for commercial purposes, then you shouldn’t need to go cap in hand.

You should be paid for your contribution. And you should be paid for your attendance at any kind of Meetups if you are a speaker, because you’re contributing. That’s my view, and I know how to do it, and I’ve told the relevant authorities how to do it. And I think that things have to change to be more appropriate to what the product of WordPress is, because it is a product rather than a project, because loads of people are making loads of money out of it.

But there’s also the freelancers out there that are using WordPress to earn a living, and they’re literally scratching a living. You know, I saw a Tweet the other day from Matt Medeiros saying, anybody willing to tell me how hard it is being a freelancer in WordPress at the moment. You know, are you suffering from not getting paid on time.

I was in a little group the other day, moaning about the fact that I haven’t got paid. One guy said, and I’ll name him because he’s great, James Bullis said, well, that’s your fault because you haven’t set the rules.

And there’s no guidance for new freelancers. And he’s absolutely right. It is my fault. I didn’t set the rules to my clients, so they take their time in paying me. And so he’s moved on to GoHighLevel because, doesn’t want to do WordPress anymore, that type of thing. But he’s also moved on to being more of a consultant, rather than a web designer, developer. And I think that’s the way it’s going.

Because of AI, people can build their websites in a heartbeat. The way WordPress is going, there’s more onboarding now. You can actually build something from, especially 6.7 with the new theme there, 6.7 theme, whatever it’s called, 2025 theme. That’s much better. And the fact that you can turn off the patterns when you go to every page is just like a complete bonus.

But WordPress needs to have onboarding and it doesn’t, and that’s why it loses out, in inverted commas. I don’t think WordPress loses out to the Wix’s of this world, or the Sqarespaces of this world. I think if you’re going to use WordPress, then it’s a good decision. Just as it is a good decision to use any other web building software. But you have to be aware that it’s more long-term work.

[00:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: It’s such a strange dichotomy, WordPress, because I’ve got quite a few hobby projects that have got nothing to do with revenue generating. They’re just personal websites that I’ve put up to, I don’t know, house my thoughts for want of a better word. And so that’s completely free.

But obviously also inside the WordPress space, there’s this juggernaut of commercial products, hosting companies, plugin companies, SEO companies, you name it. It’s all been taken care of. And there’s millions, billions of dollars sloshing around inside the WordPress space.

I genuinely find it a really big puzzle trying to work out what the free portion means. And so, you know, when you say that it would be great to pay everybody, I guess that would be a fantastic aspiration, wouldn’t it? That everybody that attends a WordPress event, and does something there, let’s say, contributes their time or is a speaker or what you, not an attendee necessarily. But they would be paid for.

It is interesting how you square that circle, though. You know, where does that money come from? How does that money get corralled? How do you, for want of a better word, compel people to donate money that seems like a fairly decent moral obligation, but isn’t an actual legal obligation and so on?

I find that part of the puzzle really difficult. And obviously in more recent times, the last couple of months that is playing itself out, is going to be playing itself out in the courts fairly soon to the time of recording it. And I don’t know how to solve that problem. I just know that that problem exists.

In an ideal world where unicorns run free, and there are rainbows everywhere, everybody reaches into their pockets and donates plus 5% of everything that they’ve got in terms of time and revenue. But we don’t really live in that world, do we? And some plugin developers are hard up and it’s difficult enough just to make ends meet. So them donating time might be really difficult, on it goes.

[00:27:23] Andrew Palmer: You are right, it is difficult. But I think the big guys do contribute a little cash wise, but I don’t think it is all about the cash. It’s about the time. How do you keep the project going? Especially as so many people have left, you know, the guy that did the Rest API, forgive me, I can’t remember his name, maybe that’s because I’m 64 and it’s time ago. But he developed something that changed the way WordPress worked. And he is not in the community anymore for various reasons.

But that’s not something that can continue, people leaving Core contributions. And to have it all on one company, even though that company is making money, is irresponsible. We’ve got to find a way for people to contribute, and contribute either financially or with time. With the current situation, that’s a difficult bridge to cross, and I’m hoping that the bridge isn’t burnt. And I don’t think it is, I think it’s just severely charred. Might need some repair, you know.

There’s things going on in WordPress community that go in on other communities as well. And the difference with WordPress I think, or with web development per se, it’s not just WordPress. There is no association. Lawyers have the, in the UK they have the Law Society, which they have to adhere to certain rules. With WordPress, it’s just a free for all. With web, it’s a free for all. It’s not just WordPress, it’s all the web building technologies that you’ve got. It’s a complete free for all, and you don’t know that people are actually qualified to give you the advice that they’re saying they are self qualified to give.

And that’s I think part of the issue with all web development, and it’s a trust issue. How can I trust you? You hear so many stories, oh, my developers left me. Well okay, yeah, but why? Were you a difficult client? Or did you pay your bills on time? Why did your developer leave you? Because mostly developers will stick around with you. So let’s figure out why they left you, and if they did leave you for their own reasons and they weren’t very good at what they did, then that’s fine. But let’s make sure that we are at least transparent in what our capabilities are.

And by being a member of a society like the Law Society or something, we sign up to be good, and honest, and have some integrity, and we charge the right prices, and we don’t overcharge. Maybe things could get better by that way, who knows?

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting, isn’t it? There are initiatives, and off the top of my head, I’ve forgotten what their names are, but I will try to put in the show notes links to the endeavors to provide some kind of accreditation basically. And you’re right, certainly in the UK, if a plumber shows up at my house, or an electrician shows up at my house, firstly, I’m going to assume that they have the necessary qualifications, and if not, I’m going to ask to see it. And once I’ve seen that, I am totally happy that they can do the work that’s required, and that if things are not done to the correct standard, I’ll be able to go back to some kind of industry body and say, look what happened.

And in a sense, web development is real wild west, isn’t it? And you only have to listen to the origin story of more or less everybody that I’ve interviewed and they say the same thing. And the story kind of goes like this, well, I had a job, I wasn’t really enjoying it, so I started playing with website building in my spare time. I had a friend or a family member who wanted a website so I did that, and then realised that, oh, actually there’s something in this. And then pursued it, got better and better. The point being, there is no industry body.

And I know that this is a real divisive subject actually, because as soon as you introduce this, there are those people who think, yeah, this is a great idea, let’s get everybody accredited and we’re off to the races. We can all at least know that if you’ve got this badge, you can do this set of things, and if you’ve got this one, you can do this set of things.

And there are other people who think that that’s just a terrible idea. You know, I want to be able to learn and not have to go and sit exams and prove what I can do. My history of work will be the judge of what I can do and so on. And I don’t really know what the answer is, but having that accreditation in other walks of life definitely works. Whether or not it would work in the WordPress space, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s an interesting subject.

[00:31:16] Andrew Palmer: We do have it in WordPress in a way with the contributor badges. I’m a contributor, so I obviously know what I’m doing because I’ve got a badge that says I know what I’m doing. And you can see my profile, and you can see the plugins that I’ve developed, and all the websites that I’ve done or my Core contributions.

But we have it for, as I say, lawyers and accountants, you’ve got to be a registered chartered accountant. We have it for nurses, to be a member of an accredited association, and to pass exams, and do all the exams. But there’s things that prove that you can do what you do. And web development is one of those industries that just doesn’t have that. It’s literally, take my word for it. Here’s some stuff that I’ve done, and here’s some clients that have been happy. ie testimonials, so bite the bullet and pay the money.

[00:31:59] Nathan Wrigley: It is really difficult, isn’t it? For example, if you had a WordPress qualification, let’s say that you were wanting to classify yourself as a WordPress theme builder, developer, plugin developer, whatever. Can you imagine the amount of different accreditations that you’d have had to have gone through in the last five years? Five years ago you probably could have had one set of qualifications for the previous 15 years. And then it feels like more or less every six months you’d have to have a new one because it’s changing so much. And I’m fairly sure that in the next six months it’ll have changed beyond all recognition. In fact, I know what’s coming, as does everybody who follows the project.

But it’s going to be really difficult to keep track of, can you build blocks in the correct way now, or in the WordPress way now? Do you have the capacity to do things with full site editing in mind? And so on and so forth? Have you taken account of the new APIs that are coming at the rate of about one a week, it feels at the moment, and so on? So it would be really hard to pin that down.

And also, it’s not like we’ve got a CEO of WordPress, a commercial entity who is, if you like, just telling everybody what to do. It is, to a great extent, a community driven project. And so the direction that it goes can morph a little bit, and so that would make it difficult as well I feel.

[00:33:11] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, because it’s not, WordPress the project isn’t a commercial situation. So therefore, I love the phrase of it’s a Wild West because it is. It is the Wild West. There’s no doubt about it, is that literally you go on Fiverr, you can get a website developed for $30, 50 bucks, whatever. All the layouts that are out there are the, they’re bloated and horrible and not accessible and all this kind of stuff.

Part of the reason I’m getting out as well from web dev is accessibility. I don’t want to be held responsible for my client’s bad decisions, because I have no control. If I say to a client, well, actually to get as accessible as we possibly can, it’s going to cost you another three or five grand. They go, oh, I don’t want to do that. I say, well, it could cost you a hundred grand if you don’t spend that money in advance.

Web design is becoming more of a commodity as well. Because they’re saying, okay, well, I can have a website, but there’s other things. And what I mean, there’s a commodity, it’s a product.

With WordPress, you have an unlimited amount of other products that help it work better to your desire. LMS, forms, API connectors, all this kind of stuff, SaaS systems, whatever. Which all need updating and paying for every single year.

With a proprietary system, you get what you get. Yes, there are extensions, but there extensions really have to, people are complaining about, oh, got my plugin on wordpress.org kicked out the other day because it hasn’t got this, this, and this. Try doing a Shopify app and getting it passed. That is really hard. And keeping it there, and also knowing that, once you get to a million dollars a year on Shopify, that you’ll be having 15% of that revenue taken away from you straight away. Which is fine, I’ve got no problem with that at all. It’s just, think outside of WordPress for the moment, and think the difficulties that you’re going to have in the proprietary systems.

They’re going to be similar, not the same, because the proprietary system do the updates. I’ve had people complaining about 6.7, it’s broken layouts and things like that. And then you’ve got another guy who’s saying, well, it’s nothing wrong with that, it’s got to be a plugin conflict. And there’s no real solution. It’s just a, yeah, oh, sorry you got a problem, you know, maybe I can help you. Rather than, it can’t be anything we’ve done, and all that kind of stuff.

So you need to have a certain amount of patience to be a web developer in any platform that you are using, because there are going to. I got a quote from a client the other day, finished a massive Shopify site. There’s just one thing that broke it yesterday, which the client broke it by adding something, and he said, this is why we can’t have nice things. It just breaks.

Because it’s not a Shopify thing that he wanted to add into it, it’s a mailing system with HTML and the HTML broke. And then now we’ve got to program it round to fix it, and there’s another few hours of charges. So, you know, another couple of grand or whatever it may be. So there are problems dealing with proprietary systems as well, let me tell you. It’s not all roses out there, there’s some thorns as well.

[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it doesn’t matter which point of WordPress’ history you were to plonk yourself down on if you had a time machine. If you look in one direction, it’ll be the worst time in WordPress’ history. And you look in another direction, it’ll be the best time in WordPress’ history. And you could probably say that at any point in time. We’re just where we are, and we have to figure the way through.

But you’ve definitely been there. You’ve had an extremely long journey. I know that you’ve had your ups and your downs. And I’d just like to say, from me, it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you. Do you think we’ll see you turning up to events in the near future, or are you literally drawing a line and saying, all media closed, business shut down, nothing to do with the internet anymore. What’s going to happen?

[00:36:47] Andrew Palmer: The straight answer is no. You’re not going to see me again ever. You lucky, lucky boy. Your cup runneth over, I’m sure.

No, I mean, you know, I’ll pop in occasionally I would imagine, but I’m just going to have a rest from this arena. I think Paul, he now does Beaver Builder, Paul Lacey, he left the WordPress community for a while because it was just overwhelming, and he had an agency and he closed it down and did all sorts of stuff.

And I’m on a similar path, really. I’m just going to close my agency down. So web dev is gone. That actually happened on the first of November. I just said, no more web dev. But I’ve got maintenance clients, I mean, I’ve got recurring income from that, and that’s what’s keeping me. I’m closing my limited company because the revenue isn’t enough really to have a limited company with all the associated costs with that, it just costs more for accountancy and costs more for everything. It’s just horrible.

So sole trader from first of December, closing the limited company down at the end of December. Not owing any personal person any money, which is great, or any business any money.

And then from the first of December, trading as Andrew Palmer and doing whatever I do. But the maintenance side, so if somebody wants me to develop a website, I’ll say no, but these people will develop a website for you. And if someone wants me to build an API, I go, nope, but these people will develop that API, off you go, see you later. The maintenance side I’ll keep going because it’s cost effective for me to run and I can do it part-time. It’s not a big deal.

I’ve got one client that’s very worried that I’m going to leave her. I look after, I don’t know, 78 websites for them, so I’m not going to, yeah. But it’s not hard to look after them. And occasionally one goes down and I just go in and fix it, and five minutes later it’s right. So that’s not going. And the other clients that I’ve had for 20 years, you know, literally 20 years hosting their websites and they’re going, well, what are we going to do? I said, well, don’t worry about it, I’m keeping that side on.

I will also get it ready, you know, I nearly sold it last month, and the guy just came back to me at the last minute and said, we’re not ready and the company’s not ready. Because when you run your own business, you let a few things go. Not badly but just because you just know. You know what to do on that. So there’s no notes on it or anything like that. So, you know, I need to be able to make saleable. So within six months, I think I’ll have completely got out of the business by selling my business and doing what I want to do.

[00:39:03] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you’re going to have a portion of a toe in the water still. Just one toe, but only a little bit of that toe.

[00:39:09] Andrew Palmer: Exactly, yeah. So long as it’s nice and warm.

[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: That sounds nice. Well hopefully, we’ll get to catch up at some point in the near future, but Andrew Palmer, thank you very much for joining us today and being a part of the community for the length of time that you have. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:22] Andrew Palmer: Thanks very much. It’s been good fun.

On the podcast today we have Andrew Palmer.

Andrew’s journey with WordPress started almost two decades ago after transitioning from Joomla. He went on to make significant strides in the community, co-founding Elegant Marketplace and investing in ventures like Atarim and Bertha AI.

In this episode, we talk about the intricacies of working within the WordPress ecosystem, comparing the free and commercial sides. Andrew shares his thoughts on the challenges of financially compensating event contributors and the importance of non-financial contributions, such as time. He discusses the absence of a structured regulatory body in the web development industry, and how he thinks this can impact trust and credibility.

We discuss the lack of industry-wide accreditation in web development and the controversial nature of establishing such systems within the ever-evolving WordPress environment.

We hear about his personal and business achievements, such as guiding clients to grow their recurring income, sharing successes in SEO, and the positive experiences of community events like Meetups and WordCamps.

As we explore his thoughts on contribution expectations and financial struggles of freelancers, Andrew also touches on the changing nature of the industry with the rise of AI solutions and the long-term utility of WordPress.

Andrew’s reflections on his long career, his plans to pivot towards personal interests, and his intention to remain partially involved in the community, lead to a fun conversation which all seems to boil down to perseverance in a rapidly changing industry.

If you’ve ever thought about the complexities and commercial dynamics of the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Elegant Marketplace

Bertha AI

Milestones – The story of WordPress

Contact Form 7

Gravity Forms

WS Form

Ninja Forms

Divi

Bricks

ZipWP

Kadence WP

GoDaddy Airo

Termageddon

WPLDN

Watchful

PublishPress

InMotion hosting

GoHighLevel

WP Certify

Beaver Builder