Tech Tidbits: Bryan Bloomquist

Below is the transcript of the video

Chris: This is Brian Bloomquist.

Brian: That’s me.

Chris: He is a WordPress developer on our open source CMS team here at Creed Interactive.

Brian: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today, Chris.

Chris: Thanks for having me. All right. You ready for some WordPress-related questions?

Brian: No, We’re gonna do it anyway.

Chris: Fair enough. All right. How and why did you become a WordPress developer?

Brian: Why did I become a WordPress developer? Because Creed needed one.

Chris: That’s actually true, isn’t it?

Brian: Well, when I was hired, CRE already had a few developers who were doing WordPress work. I was hired as a React developer, but when that project finished, the other WordPress guys had already left or were leaving. Because I had basic knowledge from my last job, doing WordPress Child Themes, I was brought into the then enterprise team, now open source team. How did I become a WordPress developer? By realizing very quickly that what I knew about WordPress was almost nothing, and that I had to learn and I had to learn it fast.

Chris: Well, you’re very proficient at it now. What’s your favorite part of the development process?

Brian: I think my favorite part is at the very beginning of a project when the designs are handed over from design to development and I get to set the project up, adding colors, setting up the fonts, getting all my utility classes set up that are gonna be used across the whole site. It’s when I started planning my approach, figuring out what’s going to be built out as a block, what’s gonna be a template, are we gonna use custom post types? And, you know, just, I love the setup because I get to like develop a strategy, which is my favorite part. The architecture part.

Chris: What do you like about your job as a WordPress developer specifically at Creed Interactive?

Brian: That there is always some new project for me to work on. I get to build beautiful functional websites, and then they launch, and I get to move on to the next one.

Chris: You churn out quite a bit pretty quickly, so that’s pretty cool. How does WordPress compare to other CMSs?

Brian: Well, um, I’ve only worked with a few other CMSs, primarily Squarespace and live edit. But, uh, with my limited experience, I would say WordPress is definitely the best. It’s fairly easy to set up a website, even if you have zero coding skills, but if you do have, you know, some development knowledge, the workspace that they provide gives you so many options and opportunities to build really cool stuff. Their developer’s resources are well written, and they have nice examples, and it’s really easy to learn new things.

Chris: What’s the biggest challenge you face as a WordPress developer?

Brian: That I don’t know everything, and there’s always something new to learn.

Chris: Fair enough. Good answer. So you put a lot of time into something that’s called Block Party here at Creed and rac. Right. Tell us about Block Party. What is it and what do you enjoy about it? What can it do for people?

Brian: Blok Party is the custom WordPress theme that we’ve developed at Creed. It’s essentially, we build the website using reusable custom blocks that are designed so that the client can easily update their website without having to go through us. They can update whether it’s updating copy or moving items around changing pictures or building a whole new pages with our blocks. It makes it simple. Okay. Or I mean, I should say, I try to make it as simple as I can.

Chris: Fair enough. What do clients most often forget to pay attention to when developing a website?

Brian: So, I don’t have a lot of interaction with the clients during the development process. It’s mostly near the end of development as we’re getting ready to launch a site that I get to hear from the clients, and it’s a silly thing, but I think the client, the things that clients don’t pay enough attention to in my limited experience with them is image sizes. I’ve had clients gimme what they think is the perfect image for a banner. Not realizing that it’s only 600 pixels in width, and when you stretch it across the full 1600 pixel width or larger screens, it gets pixelated and blurry, and it doesn’t look as good, and there’s just nothing I can do to make it be higher resolution.

Chris: Good answer. I totally forgot about that. That is a big problem. All right, next question. What does SEO do? Do we need to pay attention to it, and does it work well with a WordPress SSEO?

Brian: Search Engine Optimization is a set of strategies to try to increase organic non-paid traffic to the website by optimizing its content structure and other technical aspects to raise its rank in search engine results pages. It is very important to pay attention to if you want people to come to your websites. WordPress is also very SEO friendly. It generates clean well-structured HTML, which is favored by search engines. It has numerous SEO plugins that let you add keywords to all your pages for better optimization. We install Yost SEO in almost all of our WordPress builds because it just makes it easier.

Chris: I feel like I’ve heard that WordPress is not SEO friendly, but in reality, the truth is actually the opposite.

Brian: Yes. Okay. That’s what I kind of thought. Alright.

Chris: What other technologies are you interested in learning about?

Brian: All of them. I mean, so I’m a, I’m a front end developer. All my coding involves the user interface. So I’d love to learn more about backend development, setting up databases and all that stuff.

Chris: Cool. All right. We made it to the bonus question here. If you could only play board games or video games, what would you pick?

Brian: JavaScript. Oh, wait, no, this doesn’t have to do with coding. Um, board games or video games.

Chris: I mean, that’s an easy, I, board games hands down pretty big into board games. I do, I love board games. I like the social interaction that’s built into board games, sitting around a table with your friends and just having a good time.

Chris: Very cool. All right. So super secret hidden question here, You’re, yeah, You’re known at Creed for being a trivia wizard. Right. So my question is, Richard Hatch is the first winner of what Reality TV show?

Brian: Oh, you found my kryptonite. I don’t watch reality TV.

Chris: You didn’t know it

Brian: As soon as I say it though, I’m gonna guess Survivor.

Chris: Oh, that’s right. That’s exactly right. He was the naked guy on Survivor, if you remember correctly.

Brian: It was a long time ago.

Chris: Alright, well thanks. Thanks, Brian, for taking the time to talk to me, and, uh, time for you to get back to work.

Brian: Anytime.

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