I’ve lived around the Pacific Northwest my whole life, and I’m based out of Vancouver WA. Over the last 10 years I have seen a lot of terrible websites produced on the west coast. I develop a lot of sites in WordPress. I can say every week I’m contacted by some local business owner who says they have spent x amount of dollars and are stuck with a websites they don’t like. This is because some so called web designer who thought WordPress was easy built them a crap website. They are stuck, they hate WordPress, and they don’t trust web designers. Not to mention they have spent all their money with some previous developer.
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I don’t want WordPress to catch the blame for this industry problem. The problem today is we have a low barrier to entry for web designers. Anyone with a 300 dollar laptop and knows how to click an auto-install link can say they create websites in WordPress. There is this phrase, WordPress is easy that is thrown around too much. It’s easy until you get into some code, and hopefully the web person actually knows some actual coding. There are some good developers up here in the Northwest, but you really have to look hard to find them. Everytime a local Vancouver WA or Portland OR small business contacts me and wants me to take over theis website they have I feel like they have been scammed. If you can install WordPress, and customize the default 2015 theme with some colors and a logo and someone pays you for this you are scamming people out of their money.

We need some ethical standards brought to this profession. I want to continue to make websites and developing in WordPress for the next 20+ years. I contrubute to WordPress, and help develop custom themes and plugins. If your looking for a local WordPress web developer in or around Vancouver WA, come find me first before you get a website from someone in a coffee shop.