Three Ways to Handle Technical Chores For Your WordPress Blog

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

Here’s three ways to handle CSS, styling and programming chores for your WordPress blog:

1. Use the default layouts, and just twiddle with the easy stuff like font sizes. That’s pretty much what I do. Then again, I’m not a visual designer and I’ve been programming way too long to much care.

   It’s not uncommon for programmers to be a little slack in this respect. I’m personally much more concerned about how well my code is designed.

2. Pay someone to do exactly what you want. This easier said than done, unless you have a fair bit of experience with technical communication. Here’s some guidelines:
   • Western programmers are expensive but a good one will “do what you want” rather than doing what you tell them to do. This is a good thing. If you have little technical experience and little outsourcing experience, you will probably save a lot of time and money by hiring out domestically, by which I mean USA, Canada, Western Europe.
   • Eastern Euro programmers can be less expensive, may well “do what you want,” might do what you tell them to do instead. Roberto Koci in Serbia has done absolutely superb work for me in the past. He’s not always available, get him when you can.
   • Indian and Chinese programmers can be very inexpensive. However, they may do EXACTLY what you tell them to do… which is highly unlikely to be what you actually want. You can get lucky here, there are superb programmers in Asia, but you’re going to have to work at finding the right person. I have no problem outsourcing to such teams because I can chunk the work down into small, tightly defined units.
3. Suck it up and teach yourself CSS. You will save time and money in the long run by being able to spec your outsourcing much better. It’s not that hard anyway.

You can also split the difference. Have an expensive person spec it out for inexpensive implementation. I’m available for this kind of work, and I’ve done it very successfully in the past.