Looking to hire a kick-ass WordPress developer

2012-06-28

My web agency Odd Alice, which focus on WordPress design and development, is looking for a WordPress developer in the US (or Canada, I guess), for part or full-time work. We’ll start with a (paid, obviously) evaluation period, and if that works out for everybody we’ll be prepared to sign a longer and/or ongoing contract.

Perhaps you are that developer?

First and foremost, most projects at Odd Alice, which is located in Sweden by the way, are fairly high end. We don’t do the PSD to theme for $500 stuff. Our clients are newspapers, banks, ice cream companies, the Swedish foreign department, and so on. We do accept smaller projects as well, just not as often, and usually only because we feel it is something we want to do. Yes, we’re spoiled that way.

Our clients expect beautiful design, themes that won’t break when WordPress is updated, sites that are easily maintained for the editorial team, and clever custom solutions to fit their needs. That means custom plugins and a lot of planning to create the best possible product for our customers.

The company motto pretty much says it all: We want to make the web better.

Still sounds interesting? This is what we want:

You need to be a really good WordPress developer, used to follow code standards (both WordPress and in general) and interested to keep up to date on these things.
You’ll be working with both themes and plugins, so you need to know your way around both. We have an inhouse designer though, so you don’t need to be a designer yourself (although an eye for that doesn’t hurt).
You need to be attentive to detail. If you get a design that you’re supposed to convert to a theme, for example, we expect you to do that more or less pixel perfect.
In terms of skills, you need to be fluent in PHP, HTML and CSS, all current versions.
If you’re good at JavaScript that’s good too, but it is not a requirement.
You need to be a friendly fellow, easy to work with, as well as disciplined and proud of what you do. We all need to get along, work should be fun and rewarding, not just paid hours, so this is important to us, and probably to you too.

An average workday might look like this, although we expect you to come up with an even better one that fits your days: You get up, have breakfast and whatnot, and when you start working you check Basecamp (which we use for all our projects) for todo’s, questions, discussions, and so on. You sign in to our Campfire room, where we chitchat about everything but also sometimes talk about work and help each other out. We talk a bit, discuss how things have been going, make some decisions, post nonsense cat videos, brainstorm a bit, and then your day is moving on and ours are over. At times we’ll use Skype for video meetings, since it is good to say hi and wave a bit every now and then. You work through the day, log what you’re doing in Basecamp, possibly creating todo’s for others as the need to arise, then get off work, and soon it’ll be morning in Sweden and some of us will check in.

The idea is to find someone who likes to work ad-hoc, and who is disciplined enough to get his or her (either is fine) work done. Initially we just want to overlap your work with ours, but in the future we might look to develop a local office and whatnot, we’ll see.

So what does it pay? It depends on who you are and what you know. We’re prepared to pay well, this is not a $750/month gig. However, we do realize that some people are more qualified than others, and we’ll be prepared to pay accordingly, hence no set wage. Also, see below.

Are you interested? Then email hi at oddalice.com with the following:

A short introductionary “letter” where you tell us who you are, what you like doing, and other stuff that might or might not let us learn a little bit about you as a person.
Your proposed salary for part and full time respectively.
A list of your skills and why you fulfill our needs. Make this brief, and focus on WordPress and PHP.
If you have a CV, do link or attach it. PDFs and RTFs are fine, doc/docx is not. Links to Linkedin or whatever is preferable.

We hope to be hearing from you. In the future, we also hope to have oddalice.com set up for this sort of thing, much like we have towards our Swedish audience.