I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked for great people — like Millicent Fenwick, the Congresswoman from New Jersey who was immortalized as Lacy Davenport in the Doonesbury comics. I’ve worked for great organizations — like the US Senate and House of Representatives, Phillips Academy, Lotus Development, IBM.
I’ve kissed a couple of frogs as well, but I won’t drive any traffic to them… 
For the past year or so, I have had the great good fortune to learn how to establish and grow my own consulting business. It has been at times very hard, at others quite easy. But it has been above all a fantastic learning experience.
Just like when I moved from education to the software business, about twenty-two years ago, I decided to get hands-on with some of the technology that would help me build my practice, and about which I would advise clients.
I bought Adobe Dreamweaver so that I could understand HTML, CSS, PHP.
I started a couple of Typepad blogs. Then realized I should have started out on WordPress and have since moved all of them over.
Twitter came into my life, almost ruined it, and now plays a “supporting actor” role in almost all of my work — personal, avocational, professional.
Along the way, I learned about, then downloaded, the DIYThemes WordPress theme called “Thesis.” This guy Chris Pearson wrote it, and has done an admirable job architecting it for both customization and reasonable maintenance overhead. By reasonable, I mean reasonable enough that I can manage it, for myself and for a few local businesses I’ve done some pro-bono work for.
I’m a technophile who wants to understand how this stuff works in order to inform my understanding of how clients should (or shouldn’t) use these tools. That’s why I get the fingernails dirty, figuratively speaking. And I remember enough from my training as a fairly low-level systems programmer to know when a well designed product comes along.
Check out Thesis. It will give you the flexibility you need to grow and change and customize, the stability you need to know it’ll “just work,” and a great support community.
As an erstwhile purist, I wanted to believe that to get the web presence I wanted, I’d either have to hand code it or hire someone to do so for me. Not so much.
There are great tools and support available out there in the Open Source world. And the GenX&Y / millenial types coming up behind will enter the workforce with the skills to run these systems. I’m glad I’m not in enterprise software any more.
JK! JK!
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