Introducing Marjorie Ray

Marjorie is a digital strategist and web designer living in Southern Vermont. She is also a videographer, runs a toy company, and co-manages the Brattleboro WordPress Meetup.

Show Notes

Web Design/Digital Marketing | www.codewryter.com

Buy Art | www.artfinder.com/richrayart#

Nature Toy | www.hspnaturetoys.com

Facebook |

Instagram | @codewryter

Twitter | @Marjorie_Ray

Linked-In | linkedin.com/in/marjorieray/

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 28.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we have with us Marjorie Ray. Marjorie is a digital strategist and web designer living in Southern Vermont. She is also a videographer, runs a toy company, and co-manages the Brattleboro WordPress Meetup. Her kids say you can always find her in a crowd by her laugh. Hi Marjorie!

Marjorie: Hey, thanks for having me.

Liam: You’re very welcome, Marjorie. How are you today?

Marjorie: I’m doing really good. It’s great to be here.

Liam: Yeah, we’re delighted that you’re here. Can you share a little bit more beyond what Tara just wrote about you? Tell us about yourself.

Marjorie: Well, I live in Vermont, a little bit above Brattleboro, Vermont. And I’ve been here about 15 years, I moved here from California, although I am from the east coast originally. I am married and have three boys. Two of them are in college and one is still living at home. I work in WordPress, about 50-60% of my day is doing websites, and the other part of my day I run a toy company that my father in law started. My husband and I run it together. It’s nature toys, there’s an underground root farm and an underground worm farm so I also raise worms, forgot to say that. We had a website that my brother did, it was a really great website, very engaging and colorful, but I could never make changes on it. And this was about 10 years ago. I had taken computer programming in college very, very long time ago, I’ve taken some different like Cobalt and Fortran and different classes. So I felt capable of doing something to the website but I just didn’t know how. And my brother, I just felt like I was bugging him if I asked for him to make a change. Another toy company in this area, Mary Meyer Toys, they had just started using WordPress and I actually didn’t know it was WordPress at the time, but one of the guys that I know was saying that they could get on their website and they could make changes to the pricing or just little typographical changes, and that was really all I wanted to do. That was the beginning of me becoming a web developer, just wanting to make simple changes.

Liam: And that was your way into WordPress?

Marjorie: That was my way in. I happened to be mentioning this to a friend who said, “Well, why don’t you take a class at Marlboro College?” Marlboro College graduate school had a open source web development program at that ti...