Episode 98: Michelle Ames

Introducing Michelle Ames

Michelle says she is an overextended, over-committed entrepreneur, author, blogger and social butterfly. As a WordPress fanatic, Michelle is the Head of Customer Success at GiveWP.

Show Notes

Twitter | @michelleames

Website | All The Things By Michelle

GiveWP | GiveWP.com

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we are joined by Michelle Ames. Michelle says she is an overextended, overcommitted entrepreneur, author, blogger and social butterfly. She’s an avid Scrabble player, a mother, a serial volunteer, a marketing enthusiast, and 11th hour expert. As a WordPress fanatic, Michelle is the Head of Customer Success at GiveWP. Welcome, Michelle.

Michelle: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Tara: So glad to have you. And what litany of great things to chat with you about today. But I’ll let you start out by maybe telling us in a nutshell a little bit more about you.

Michelle: Sure. Well, as you can hear from my little intro there, I’m a very busy person, but I like to be busy. Busy is what keeps me going and gets me up every morning, and keeps me as an active part of society and WordPress and all the different parts that are in my life. They always say if you want something done, ask a busy person, which is why my list gets longer every single day.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your background with WordPress and tech. How did you get started and how long have you been in WordPress?

Michelle: I was in higher education for 20 years. And while I was working at the University of Rochester, I worked on my MBA. It was the early 2000s and the e-commerce boom had just started. That’s what every single website was considered e-commerce – you might remember – and every single school suddenly had an e-commerce truck that you could do.

So I was working on my MBA with a concentration in information systems, marketing, and e-commerce. And by the time I graduated, the bottom had fallen out of the market, and suddenly websites were selling for $1.99, whereas before they were selling for $100 or $50. So suddenly, I was like, “Well, I guess I’m going to keep working in higher education for a while longer. And I did.

I was the director of a massage school for five years, and one of my best friends who was a graduate, she said, “I really want to start a nonprofit organization for massage therapist to help them continue their careers.” So we said to her husband who was a WordPress guy, “Hey, build us a website.” So he built us the shell of a website and then the next thing he said is, “Here are your logins, go ahead and put the content in yourself.”

So I remember logging in that very first day terrified that I would do something to break the internet. Not just my website, but the whole internet. And so, I very timidly started clicking links, and within about 10 minutes was like, “This is really cool.” And I became a WordPress fanatic I think right from that first day.

I had no idea though how to go from, “Hey, I bought a URL” to “Hey, I have a WordPress website.” So I said to her husband, I said, “Would you teach me how to do that?” They had five kids. They said, “If you come over and make dinner while she’s working, I will teach you how to build a website.