Introducing Rich Tabor

Rich Tabor is a full-stack creative professional. Designer, developer, maker, and writer. He’s laid back but he’s also hard-hitting. Rich loves learning and bringing on growth through challenges.

Show Notes

Website | richtabor.com

Website | Themebeans.com

Twitter | @richard_tabor

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 19.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we have Rich Tabor on this show. Rich is a full-stack creative professional. Designer, developer, maker, and writer. He’s laid back but he’s also hard-hitting. Rich loves learning and bringing on growth through challenges.

Tara: Hi, Rich.

Rich: Hey, how’s it going?

Liam: Rich, it’s going great. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little more about yourself beyond the 25-30 words that we just heard?

Rich: Sure. My name is Rich Tabor and like I said, I’m a full-stack creative– I guess that means I pretty much wear a lot of hats. I love learning, teaching, writing, actually doing creative work and developing. I enjoy making things come to fruition and whether that’s personally or professionally, it’s all summed up into one for myself.

Tara: It sounds like you work alone or do you have an agency or employees or coworkers?

Rich: A little bit of both. I work on my own stuff. I’ve got my theme shop, ThemeBeans, where I make themes for creative professionals. I also work for Envato reviewing WordPress things on ThinkForest. I pick up clients here and there doing contract work for WordPress websites typically but that’s a little bit of, I guess, the trifecta of what I do.

Tara: Okay. Tell us a little bit about your background, where you come from and how you learned to do what you do?

Rich: Yes. I live in Northern Georgia, about an hour and a half north of Atlanta with my beautiful wife and two baby girls. I started getting into the WordPress space when I graduated college and I was studying marketing and learned design back in the old Photoshop days. Then I graduated, went into a marketing position at a local company and did only design work for them. The developers pretty soon were like, “Hey Rich, we can’t do all this. This is way out of scope, way too complicated. Way too much work.” I was like, “Okay, naturally I should learn the rules of the game.” I learned how you do a front-end design when I was there and that soon evolved into doing WordPress themes and then plugins and I just love learning so I just kept going.

Tara: What is your primary source of learning? Do you have a go-to book or a website that you use?

Rich: To be cliche, Google. I pretty much, when I’m developing or working on something new and I run into problems and google your way out of it.

Tara: And do you do some client work?

Rich: I do. I do all sorts of stuff locally, especially in a small business scene around here. I just picked up a thing to do the local school system’s websites around here, which is pretty neat because school systems have a lot of needs and their websites are not very functional or attractive, or no one really wants to pick up that type of burden. I really think serving my local community in that fashion...