Introducing Andy McIlwain

Andy McIlwain tackles content and community projects at GoDaddy. He’s a fan of the arts, impromptu road trips, user-friendly technology, and helping Canadian small businesses work with the web.

Show Notes

Website | https://andymci.com

Twitter | @andymci

ToDoIst

Trello

Pocket

TripIt

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now, the conversation begins. This is episode 12.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we have Andy McIlwain joining us. Andy tackles content and community projects at GoDaddy. He is a fan of the arts, impromptu road trips, user-friendly technology, and helping Canadian small businesses work with the web.

Andy: Howdy!

Tara: Hi Andy! How are you?

Andy: I’m doing all right. How are you guys doing?

Tara: Good. We’re so glad you’re with us.

Andy: I’m happy to be here.

Tara: We’re glad to have our first Canadian on the show. Tell us about yourself, Andy. Tell us a little bit more than what Liam just introduced.

Andy: Sure thing. My name is Andy McIlwain. I’m out of Canada. I was born and raised in Ontario. I’ve been working with WordPress for about ten years now. I’m a longtime advocate. My full-time gig is at GoDaddy. I look after content and lead projects over there. I do a lot of work with our GoDaddy Pro program. So I’m helping web designers, developers who are managing their clients who are using GoDaddy products. At the end of the day, pretty much everything I do goes back to helping small businesses. It just quite a passion for me.

Liam: That is awesome! We love small businesses. Tara and I both run our own. That’s great to hear that you’re so supportive of that particular community. So you say you’ve been a longtime user and big advocate of WordPress. Tell us a little bit about how you got into WordPress. Where did it all start for you?

Andy: For me, it was the early days. I was building fan sites. I was a kid building fan sites of video games and hobby stuff. That was a big interest for me. It was never really the coding. It was just about sites built out, getting the content pulled together, and putting something online. It was great because it had a very low barrier to entry compared to some other stuff. You didn’t need a lot of money to build a website. You just needed to know what steps to take. There were a lot of free services on line (Tripod GeoCities all those). I started getting into content management systems as a hobby. I was probably fifteen playing with different tools like Grey Matter and Textpattern. Eventually, when I was in college, I had an instructor who weaned me off Textpattern and said use WordPress. Why are you using Textpattern? Nobody uses Textpattern anymore. I got into WordPress around 2007, and I’ve been swearing by it ever since. Everywhere I go, and everywhere I work, I start spreading the good word of WordPress.

Liam: I am going to pause for just a second and Hooray your shoutout for Textpattern. That’s where I got into making my own database driven websites and not relying on a developer. I’m very much a designer. So yeah, woo for good old fashioned Textpattern!