Interview: Lisa Presely, Web Master at The Independent

Lisa Presely is the current Web Master for The Independent and one time student of WordPress here at Clark College. Lisa in fact, decided to attend Clark College to learn more about WordPress.

Ever since I discovered WordPress, just a couple of years ago, I quickly fell in love with the fact that I could have a website almost instantly by choosing a theme and entering my information, and…bam! A website!

Since then, especially since I took the WordPress class at Clark College, I have also fallen in love with the way I can completely make a WordPress Theme my own by customizing almost any aspect of a Theme into the specific details that I need.

Matt:

Did you have a defining moment that ignitied you to continue your education?

Lisa:

I have been a stay at home mom for 16 years. In that time, I only worked part time outside of our home for a few months. My kids are all in school full-time now, and even though I still keep busy with the demands of my home life, I felt a strong desire to continue my education.

I knew I had skills that could help others, and I wanted to learn more about web design in order to build beautiful things for other people…and web design gives me an opportunity to hopefully be able to do it mostly from home so I can still be available for my kids.

It was important for me to teach my kids that we can do hard things. I knew adding school to my already busy life wouldn’t be easy, but I felt like it was the right time, and my kids have been nothing short of amazing in helping me achieve this goal.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to change careers, start a first career or just improve their job skills by learning WordPress?

Exactly one year ago, I knew I needed a new career field, and I wanted to make sure that if I was going to take the time and money to go to school for it, that it needed to be something I loved! For me, it was web design, and more specifically, to learn about WordPress in depth. I saw potential in that field, and I continue to see it.

If you love a career that you constantly need to stay on your toes about what you’re learning (I LOVE to learn!), then web design is for you! Especially if you love to create and design beautiful things that make other people happy. That is my joy in life, and with WordPress, I can do that.

Does your five year plan include continuing your WordPress mastery?

Absolutely!

Given any content management system to work with, I will always choose WordPress.

I have done my research, and I am very impressed with the way WordPress stays on top of the changes in technology and builds them into their users’ experiences.

They have the best, most generous group of users, who continue to give up their own time to help other people learn about the benefits and joys of WordPress. The WP community is so helpful! It doesn’t matter if you are working with WordPress.com or WordPress.org, you will always find the answer to your questions out there.

If you are interested in WordPress, you should really try to go to a WordCamp. I went to my first one this year in Portland, Oregon, and I met so many wonderful people there who just wanted to share what they had learned with people like me who are trying to make a living out of this.

What has been the biggest challenge of running The Independent?

There really haven’t been a lot of challenges with The Independent. The people I worked with to build the site were fantastic, and very supportive. Any of the challenges that have come about have been because I am still a student of web design, and really need to learn a lot more about what I’m doing! But that is the great part of working for a student run newspaper…we are all students here, and we are loving what we are learning.

As a web designer one of them is wrapping my brain around the complexity and constant changes of coding.

I can do it, and I’m continuing to build my weakness into a strength, but with WordPress in my tool box, I can build a gorgeous site without much coding involved.

It is a beautiful thing that has given me the chance to start building sites for other people before I had the ability to code much at all.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris, a 19th century British textile artist and poet.