Episode 90: David Wolfpaw

Introducing David Wolfpaw

David is a professional web developer focused on helping small businesses by providing ongoing WordPress maintenance and support through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando.

Show Notes

Twitter | @davidwolfpaw

Website | Fix Up Fox

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 90.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam, Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by David Wolfpaw. David is a professional web developer focused on helping small businesses by providing ongoing WordPress maintenance and support through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando. Welcome, David. Glad to have you here.

David: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Hey David. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

David: Yes. Professionally, I’ve been doing a lot of web development. Not professionally, I started web development in high school which at this point now is almost 20 years ago. And then I started doing web development professionally when I was in college when the things that I was doing for fun, for myself, just building little websites for myself or for my friends, other people started asking me to do them as a business. At the time, I was charging an embarrassingly low amount even for that time. Over the years I have slowly increased both my skill level and the billing. And then in 2008 I believe is the first time I discovered WordPress.It had just hit version 3.0 so I only got– Actually, sorry, it doesn’t matter but I came in a little bit before that so I know when custom post types came out, that was very exciting in 3 .0. So just about 11 years now I’ve been working with WordPress and I’ve been managing WordCamp Orlando and WordPress Orlando, the meetups since 2012.

Liam: That’s a lot of WordPress. When did you start working for yourself? We heard earlier in our conversation that you have a company called FixUpFox. Did that spin right out of college? Did you graduate and then just go right into self-employment?

David: Well, yes and no. Actually, just before I graduated, I realized that– I was doing this basically off the books for a few years and just before I graduated in 2009, I realized I should get a little bit more formal, more official. I just had my 10-year anniversary. The parent company is actually called Orange Blossom Media. I can get into a little bit about the name thing but just at the 10-year anniversary, about a week or two ago.

Liam: Congratulations.

David: Thank you very much. And through that time, I worked for two other agencies doing some work for them, but I always kept the company going in the background. The second company that I worked for, it was basically a go to work, go home, take a nap, eat dinner, and then spend another five or six hours on the computer working on client work, until I got to the point where I was making about as much at home as I was at the other job. So, of course, when I quit that, I did have an income drop. But the extra time let me build a business up a bit more. I started out doing custom website builds. That would include building custom themes, custom plugins for clients, or just setting things up. But then I noticed that a lot of clients were coming back to me. They would say– I’m talking about a year or two later for some of them. “Hey, we love the site but somebody hacked us.” Or,