Celebrating 5 years of WordPress Developer Jem Turner
This month Jem Turner – Shropshire WordPress expert and PHP developer – celebrates 5 years in business and covers some of the wins she’s experienced so far.
From humble beginnings, sat on the sofa with a newborn baby in the crook of one knee and a cheap laptop covered in spit up and cake crumbs balanced on the other, juggling a newly launched career as a self-employed web developer a few weeks after becoming a second time mum was never going to be easy. I don’t know what possessed me to dive into working for myself at such a crazy ‘full on’ time, but 5 years on it can only be described as a success.
Starting out with a single client – Magiboards, Ltd – whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with for over 10 years now on some exciting and forward thinking projects, I quickly gained additional work through my active presence on social media. By some miracle, there are people out there who can look past my terrible jokes (and frequent swearing) on twitter and send work my way!
These days, with a portfolio of clients ranging from other ‘work at home mums’ to national and international businesses, it’s not so much looking past the terrible jokes on twitter as barely finding the time to tweet: managing over 30 WordPress websites as well as a number of one-off projects at any single point in time does rather preclude wasting hours sharing memes with friends and contacts across the world.
When I’m not working on my own projects, I like to collaborate with local design and marketing agencies on their WordPress projects: providing expert support and over 10 years of WordPress experience to ensure that they’re meeting exact client briefs with front and back-end development that is optimised for speed, for search engines, and most importantly for customer experience.
Having recently worked with local award-winning creative agency Source on a number of their beautifully designed WordPress websites, Managing Director Sally Tringham had this to say:
Jem’s knowledge and experience of the WordPress platform has proved invaluable to Source in the time that she has been working with us. Her ability to quickly and efficiently build a WordPress website from the visuals provided is second to none – as is her willingness to support our in-house development team with their WordPress projects. Source would have no hesitation in recommending Jem to anyone looking for an experienced WordPress developer for their project or agency.
As well as working on stunning commercial and business websites, I have recently agreed to help Shropshire Cat Rescue, a charity close to my heart (as a well known crazy cat lady), relaunch their website. Working with other tech help and loyal volunteers, I hope to bring new functionality to a freshly designed website using bespoke WordPress plugin development to give a better experience to potential adopters, increase sponsorship and donations, and decrease admin time spent on publicising the charity’s digital presence. No pressure!
The past 5 years have been one heck of a ride: providing lessons on business management and client communication, as well as giving me opportunities to improve my development techniques, and I can’t wait to apply those lessons and experience to the next five years.