Brad Williams (WebDevStudios)

Brad Williams is the co-founder and CEO of WebDevStudios.com. He is also a co-author of the books Professional WordPress and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad founded the Philly WordPress Meetup in 2010, co-organized the first five WordCamp Philly events, and also co-organized both WordCamp US events held in Philly. He has been developing websites for more than 20 years, including the last 10 where he has focused on open-source technologies like WordPress.

Aaron: [00:08] Hi, this is Aaron and you are listening to the WP Square One podcast.

Micah: [00:14] And my name is Micah Wood. And with us today we have a special guest, the Co-founder and CEO of WebDevStudios, Brad Williams. Welcome, Brad.

Brad: [00:23] Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Aaron: [00:25] Yeah, no problem. Thanks for taking some time. I’m sure you’re busy.

Brad: [00:30] Sometimes.

Aaron: [00:32] Sometimes do you fake people out and you look busy?

Brad: [00:36] Hey, I’m very good at projecting whatever I need to look like online. That’s the easy part. Right?

Aaron: [00:41] Fair enough. So tell us a little about what you do, who you are, and what your company does.

Brad: [00:47] Sure. So like you said, I’m Brad Williams. I founded a company called WebDevStudios almost eleven years ago. We had our ten-year anniversary last year and we’re a 100%-focused WordPress design and development agency. WordPress is the only platform we build on. We certainly integrate with a lot of other platforms and services but WordPress is our bread and butter. Been having a lot of fun working with WordPress for the last decade plus. No signs of slowing down, so it’s been great.

Aaron: [01:19] That’s cool. What led you into web development, and I guess, specifically WordPress?

Brad: [01:26] I got into web development a long time ago, back in the nineties when the Internet first started kind of taking off. Mid-nineties. I was in high school, just tinker around HTML. I think I launched an Angelfire “website” with a couple of random pages to show my friends at school. But it definitely piqued my interest. I always liked the Internet once I got onto the Internet. I always kind of saw the potential back then. Not a lot of people were on; it’s mostly chat rooms and stuff. But that really got me interested in the Internet and the web and I just kind of took it from there. Ever since then, I’ve taken any class I could take. I would read any book I could read, dig through all sorts of online forums, which were much bigger back then, just to learn everything I could because there weren’t as many resources, obviously, as there are today. My school didn’t have programming classes; this is all very new stuff. I think they had just started a typing class around the middle of high school. I knew I wanted to be in the Internet. Wasn’t exactly sure how I ended up going to the Marine Corps. Joined the Marine Corps after high school. Was never big into school. The stuff I enjoy, like computers and tech, I would ace them in my sleep. Everything else, I was miserable at. So, I decided maybe I shouldn’t go right into college because it didn’t sound exciting, but I didn’t want to sit around.

[02:49] So I actually became, believe it or not, a programmer in the Marine Corps. I let the Marines teach me how to program even more. Did my four-year tour, got out, and got a job at a large e-commerce company. Worked there for five years and then once I felt like I had a little bit of an establishment in a career, learned the ropes a little bit more about online and business, decided to start WebDevStudios in 2008. Traditional startup. Looking back, it was insane. We had no clients lined up. We really didn’t have a lot of savings, like a couple of thousand dollars. I picked up my whole life from Indiana and moved to New Je