Hacker News Reader

Comment by EmmEff | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like solid advice. I've done freelance work with Wordpress for one of my clients and it showed potential. Any tips on pitching WordPress to those who are not sure what it can do for them? This client, in particular, I was working with was interested in setting up an online store using WooCommerce.

FWIW, I am a developer with strong Linux/unix admin knowledge, and plenty of PHP experience.

View on HN

As someone who frequently hires Wordpress freelancers, I offer this:

Don't 'sell' the client on using Wordpress relative to other frameworks. They don't need to know the complete power and limitations of the WP ecosystem; that's your job (in their eyes). Just say 'yes.'

>Can I add products later? Yes. >Can I add pages? Yes. >Can I add coupons? Yes. >Does it have SEO? Yes.

It's easy work for someone like you with sysadmin and PHP skills. Your client will love how quickly you can diagnose whatever problems they're having.

Thanks! I think a lot about this, and start changing my profile, at first I was mention the tech skills in my profile I change it to more functional speech.

And I promise I will be less technical when doing proposals. Thanks for your comment I really think a lot about this.

I'm a full-time wordpress developer. Wordpress is diverse enough to be a solid platform for e-commerce, CRM, CMS, and a lot of other social-styled websites. In other words, it's not just for blogs. It's popular enough that it's an easy sell, and there's a ton of work around it.

WordPress is a 10k piece of software that is completely free. You start from there, and explain how and why OSS works, and what work they would be paying for.

If they can understand the "everyone does a little bit" model (an overgeneralization), and understand the value proposition of WordPress, there's not really a lot to sell. Almost everyone can afford a WordPress installation and WordPress can scale to fit almost everyone's needs. Just don't abuse it.

Find out their business problems and talk to them about those. People don't care about the technology (ok, most of them) but they do care about their problems.

Don't even mention wordpress.

More here: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/get-started/

Yes, my early jobs when I was in school was about sysadmin and later learn PHP and Python. at first I sell my profile as a sysadmin expert and reading the comments I feel that was a mistake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com