Introducing Matt Whiteley

Matt is the creator and owner of Whiteley Designs, a one-man WordPress development hosting and maintenance agency specializing in the Genesis Framework. He’s married, with a three-year-old daughter and another child on the way in May 2018.

Show Notes

Website | Whiteley Designs

Twitter | @whiteleydesigns

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: Today’s show is brought to you in part by Liquid Web.

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Tara: And one of the things we love most, when your content goes viral, Liquid Web doesn’t charge you more for huge spikes in traffic. Transparent pricing, no surcharges.

Liam: Liquid Web is offering Hallway Chats listeners 33% off for the first three months. Go to Liquidweb.com and use the coupon code, HALLWAYCHATS, all one word, to sign up.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 32.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we have with us Matt Whiteley. Matt is the creator and owner of Whiteley Designs, a one-man WordPress development hosting and maintenance agency specializing in the Genesis Framework. He’s married, with a three-year-old daughter and another on the way in May. Welcome, Matt.

Matt: Hey, guys.

Liam: Hey, Matt. How are you? Thanks for joining us today.

Matt: Doing alright, thanks for having me on.

Liam: Excellent. Well, we’re glad to have you here. Tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara just shared?

Matt: Like Tara said, I am the creator and founder of Whiteley Designs. I do WordPress hosting, WordPress development, maintenance plans. As she mentioned, I am the father of a soon to be three-year-old and, by the time this airs, I may have a little boy joining the family in May, so that’s exciting. I’ve been married for about eight years, been working with WordPress for about ten years. Yeah, it keeps me busy and there’s always something to do, whether it’s family-related, or WordPress-related, or work-related.

Liam: Yeah, that’s quite the intro. You got it all going on there. Tell us a little bit about how you got into working for yourself and whether or not that led you to WordPress or vice versa?

Matt: It was roughly 10 years ago, it’s kind of an interesting story. It was back when Groupon was really popular and I was on the job hunt at that time, and Groupon was huge, commercials everywhere. And I thought, “This is something we can do locally. Just offer the businesses a little better revenue share if they want to work with somebody local.” Problem was I had no idea how to build a website and that is a big part of Groupon. So I did some googling and I came across something called Groupbuy site which, unbeknownst to me, was a WordPress plugin theme combination that created the functionality that worked just like Groupon. Before buying that, I taught myself how to build a little landing page and it was just a one-page HTML– it was bad but it collected email addresses and I built up an email list and we’re talking just a box in the middle ...