When you give back to the community, there is a good chance you will receive much more than you give.

WordPress is thriving as an open source platform as well as a client services platform. Here are six steps to you can take to become a more respected WordPress developer that clients return to for work time and time again:

Define your skills

If you are doing client services, it’s important to effectively define your array of skills. The term “WordPress Developer” isn’t very insightful to your overall abilities. An analysis of many WordPress developers would likely return a huge variation of skill in CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress best practices.

You don’t have to be a “full stack” developer to be a successful consultant. But you do have to be honest about your skill set. Be honest with yourself and be honest with your potential clients. Be sure to market yourself appropriately and take projects where you are able to effectively perform the work and meet expectations.

Dominate fundamentals

Understanding key WordPress fundamentals is a skill. Even an already great programmer learning WordPress will still need to develop an understanding of items like the WordPress coding standards, template hierarchy, template and conditional tags, the WordPress hook system, and the platform’s many built in APIs.

Therefore, if you are just getting started with WordPress, spend time learning “the WordPress way” of doing things. Whether you are a seasoned programmer or a beginner, it will save you countless hours in the long run.

Be part of the larger community

The community surrounding WordPress is one of its greatest achievements. Many potential clients request WordPress because they have heard just how big the ecosystem is. A large, thriving community means that more people are contributing to the project with Core code, plugins, themes, and more.

My advice for any new developer is to start blogging. Your website is your primary WordPress identity. I learn a great deal blogging about WordPress, and it’s helped me create new relationships with other people in the community while improving my abilities.

Within the official WordPress properties, here are four ways to quickly get involved:

Contribute to WordPress Core. If you follow this method, I recommend you start with a simple patch to establish trust with the Core team. Don’t try and reinvent the platform with your first patch.



Contribute to the documentation. When you develop with WordPress, you will inevitably end up in the Codex. These documents are a crowdsourced wiki, which means that you are able to improve upon them. Simply login with your WordPress.org username and improve upon a page that doesn’t meet your expectations or where you yourself had a hard time understanding the code based on the Codex alone.



Release plugins and themes to the WordPress repositories. There are tens of thousands of free plugins and themes, but you may have the idea that will really gain traction in the community. I’ve found that even writing simple plugins for the public has helped me grow as a developer, especially knowing that anyone in any environment could potentially use it.



Support someone in the WordPress.org forums. The forums are the first (and sometimes only) interaction many new users have with other people in the WordPress community. Simply put, there can always be more eyes on the forums. Take some time out of your day every now and then to help someone else.

When you give back to the community, there is a good chance you will receive much more than you give.

Wear the client’s shoes

Think about your own life experience. How many times have you received great customer service? Now, how many times have you received really awful customer service? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably easier for you to remember times where you received sub-par customer service than it is to remember the good experiences.

You don’t want to be someone else’s bad experience. And even though you may be thinking to yourself, “But I’m a developer, I’m not in customer support!” Well, I hate to break it to you, but in this industry, we are all part of customer support. Here are some tips for being a better customer service provider as a developer:

Anticipate the client’s future problems that they don’t have any idea exist. You’re the developer and professional. Guide them through these foreign waters.



Reply to your emails. It means a lot to your client when you are prompt and thorough with your follow-ups.



Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone. Sometimes email threads dozens deep can be prevented with a five minute phone call.



Manage expectations. Tell the client in explicit detail what is and is not included, if you have any ability to control the situation.



Exceed expectations. Go the extra mile for your client so they’ll remember you and want to use you again. This doesn’t mean you perform deliverables that weren’t paid for, it just means doing the deliverables you were paid for extremely well. For instance, provide ample documentation on how to use the feature you created.



Finish. The last ten to twenty percent can be hard. Strive to finish projects in a timely manner as originally agreed upon. Don’t let a project linger. When you finish, you get paid.

In summary, follow the golden rule. Do things for your clients that you would expect your service providers to do for you.

Exceed expectations

Yes, I already went over this. But let’s talk about exceeding expectations some more.

Imagine if another developer is your client. If they looked at your code, would you be proud? Did you comment your code? Is the syntax easy to read? Are your admin interfaces intuitive? Is there documentation to say what custom functionality exists on the website, and describes how those custom pieces work? No? Then you’re not done.

You also need to learn the word “no.” Sometimes, you can best help your client by establishing your role as the expert. If you always do what they ask, they may start to wonder why they hired you as an expert in the first place. Protect the client from themselves if they are asking you to do things that aren’t best practice.

And finally, you need to also know when to compromise. If you can accommodate their requests without sacrificing the integrity of the project (even if you are sacrificing a little pride), and it doesn’t cost you a bunch of money, the client will hopefully value these opportunities where you thoughtfully consider their opinions and give them a chance to contribute. The goal with such compromises is so that these contributors will strongly “own” the project at the end and be proud of the finished product.

In summary

You’ll notice by this point, I didn’t really talk about code. Well, that’s because there is a lot more to being a great developer than just code. I encourage you to consider these steps I’ve outlined and do some self-analysis during your next project. Do you see ways you can improve? I know that even as I offer this advice, there are plenty of areas I’ve covered where I can do better.

And that leaves me with my final point: stay hungry. As a developer, your skills are ever changing. You want to be look back at your code and your processes from the year before and be disgusted by how poorly you were doing things in retrospective. That means that you are consistently learning new things and evolving with the technology and the industry. This will help you better serve your clients for the long term.

To learn more about Brain Krogsgard, please visit his website: krogsgard.com