We are looking for an experienced wordpress designer / developer  to join our busy design studio based in Bellingen, near Coffs Harbour.

The successful applicant should be able to demonstrate an in depth knowledge of website design & development and have proven commercial experience with live examples of their work.  The applicant must demonstrate good problem solving skills and be able to communicate ideas and solutions as part of a team. We need someone who strives to complete projects on time, on budget and constantly challenge and develop their skills & knowledge.  The ideal candidate, “lives and breaths” the web and is fully aware of the latest design trends & development standards and has a keen eye for detail.

The role will be initially 16-24 hours a week (depending on skills and experience).  Working  days and times to be negotiated.  Hourly rate will be based on relevant skills and experience.  There is huge potential to develop this role into a full time position if you have the right experience and drive.  We may consider working remotely with the right applicant though great communication and project management skills will be essential.

Skills required:

• Minimum 2 years proven commercial experience in a similar role.
• Degree level qualifications or proven experience
• PHP, XHTML (HTML5 a bonus), CSS (ideally CSS3), Javascript & Ajax experience
• PSD/PNG (Fireworks preferable) to finished WordPress website
• Cross browser & platform experience including mobile & tablet
• Shopping Cart (ideally WooCommerce) experience
• In depth knowledge of WordPress, including theme, plugin & widget development

Additional Skills – great if you have them

• Mailchimp or similar email newsletter experience
• Third party API integration skills including Google Maps, Flickr, Vimeo, Soundcloud.
• Linux VPS management experience

Submission Details

Please email  your application (including the information listed below) to Mark Carpenter on jobs[a]thirtypointfour.com.au

• Your current resume
• Online or PDF portfolio with at least 5 links to websites built by you in the past year
• 2 professional references – all shortlisted candidates referees will be contacted

Essential attributes:

• Creative
• Good time & project management skills.
• Lives and breathes WordPress & the web.
• Honesty, integrity and professionalism.
• A desire to learn and develop your skills.
• Good communication skills.
• Hard working and diligent

A little know fact is a majority of spam comments are not made by flesh & blood individuals, they in fact come via automated spam bots, which scour the net for comment forms.  These bots simply fill out your comment form with a fairly non obtrusive comment in the hope you publish it.  In publishing the comment you simply create a free backlink to their website which in turn boosts their search engine rankings.  Its a multi million dollar enterprise and unfortunately on the rise as its a very cheap way to boost your website on search engines.

So how do you stop these bots?  Well the answer is simple and comes in the form of a simple WordPress plugin called Spam Free WordPress by Todd Lahman.

Fortunately spam bots are not the brightest stars in the sky and ask them to do anything out of the ordinary they fall flat on their faces.

Spam Free WordPress works in a really simple way by inserting a simple copy and paste field into your comments:

The comment is only submitted if the exact password is pasted into the empty field.  As a majority of spam bots are unable to do this you block all of them in their tracks!!

Being a simple copy and paste you also eliminate the annoying and often hard to decipher Captcha images, which so many people hate.

This plugin also does a whole heep of other clever stuff like locally banning specific IP address which is great for those cyber stalkers!  Have a look at Todds website for more details and how you can get your hands on this plugin.

Nice work Todd, keep up the good work.

Be prepared

1. Bring along examples of your existing marketing material.
2. Know who your customer is and what they want
3. Research your market & competitors
4. Prepare a list of questions or goals for the session
5. Have a rough budget, and timeline in mind for your project

Be open to suggestion

1. Its good to look at your own business from the outside, most business owners struggle being objective about their own business.
2. Keep an open mind and let us guide you from a professional standpoint, If you want us to simply agree with you and pat you on the back, try another firm we like to be honest!

Take Notes

1. Take notes on what we talk about, better still bring along someone who can do it for you.

Act on it

1. Once our session is over, act on the options and use the session to focus your project.
2. If your keen for more chances are you need us for your project so give us a call and we can start the ball rolling.

Faq’s

Will I get a formal quote from this session?

If at the end of our session you are keen for us to quote you on what we have talked about then we would be more than happy to do so.  We normally recommend that a client goes away and creates a detailed list of requirements and submits that to us for quoting.

Do we get a transcript of the session?

No the focus is on you to take notes.

Am I obliged to use you after our session?

No not at all, we hope you do but the decision is entirely up to you.

Is there a limit on the number of people in a session?

Nope, just let us know so we can have enough chairs.  If you have a large group you may need a little more time which can be arranged.

Can I do this over the phone?

Skype is best as we can share stuff with you online and vice versa.  No stress if you dont use skype, landline is also fine.  Send us any material you want us to look at via email before our session so we can check it out.

Can you come to us?

If you need us to come to you, we are more than happy though we do charge for travel time & expenses.  In the long wrong this could save you thousands, so worth thinking about!!

This has worked a little in our favour as we were able to use our new responsive wordpress framework to build our new site. This means our site is not only mobile but tablet and desktop freindly.

Its allowed us to use some of the cool bits we have developed for our clients too like mapping content on google maps, custom post types & a host of behind the scenes stuff we love to fiddle with.

As this is our own website we wanted to have a play with a few features that we have worked on over the past year.

Fully Responsive layout

Our website is built on our fully responsive framework, which allows the content to scale & resize depending on the screen size.

Geo-tagging content with Google Maps

We love google maps and over the past year we have been developing a number of systems to place web content onto a google map.  All our projects have a location and we can display them as a single map or as a project map with clickable icons.

Dynamic Forms

To gather information and keep in contact with clients we have also utilised a dynamic form builder.  Our system allows us to capture data, create content and send emails to our clients.  This powerful system can be used for online business directories,  user management, ecommerce and customing surveys.

Hope you like the new site and we look forward to writing more articles for you in the near future.