Innovating with AI

You’re a busy WordPress developer, launching new sites week after week. You know you should devote time to leveling-up your skills and building your systems ... but with all the projects you’re juggling, you just barely have time to stay afloat.

Setting aside the time for training? It's a pipe dream. Instead, you're figuring it out on the fly...

• Maybe you’ll learn some tricks from docs here and there...
  
  
• Or discover some useful YouTube tutorials...
  
  
• Or grab a code snippet from a lucky Stack Overflow thread...


And maybe you’ll get stuck ... and stay up all night scrambling to squash bugs before you miss your deadline.

At first, figuring it out as you go can be exciting. After all, you’re a lifelong learner and always looking for cool new tools to try. That nagging voice in your head keeps reminding you that someday you should build a repeatable system ... but your day-to-day workload always gets in the way.

And so, the grind continues. Sometimes everything works out and you’re proud to ship a new site. Sometimes you’re up all night and losing money on a project gone horribly awry.

That’s the life of a coder, right?

Wrong.

There’s a better, faster, smarter way to learn everything you need to know about building custom WordPress themes.

• Instead of struggling through docs and forum threads, you could have the entire, step-by-step system at your fingertips from Day One.
  
  
• Instead of taking a guess at the best approach to a challenge, you could get straightforward advice from devs with decades of experience solving the same problem.
  
  
• And instead of devoting months and months to training – and losing income by putting off paid work while you’re learning – you could learn everything you need to know in just a single business day.

If you had all that, you’d discover that finding the right training – more than any other single action you can take today – is the key to building a prosperous, profitable business and career as a WordPress developer. 

If you rely on fly-by-night Google searches for answers, you’ll eventually learn stuff, but it’ll be disjointed rather than systematic. In fact, your workflow right now probably includes an amalgamation of tips you learned here and there – an IDE from a friend, a plugin from a forum thread, a handy function from a co-worker. That kind of search-as-you-go mentality may be fine when you’re just starting out, but it will quickly distract you from your paid work, making your projects far less efficient and costing you time and money you can’t afford to lose.

And when you’re lucky enough to expand into a multi-developer team, it’s nearly impossible to translate all the processes that are in your head into a simple, clearly defined system for scaling your business up.

That’s where I was five years ago – a full-stack WordPress developer with a growing team of bright new hires who were building cool sites in a way that was basically total chaos. We were shipping great work, but there was no clear, consistent system that allowed everyone to get on the same page.

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I’m Rob Howard, the CEO of Understrap and Howard Development & Consulting, the Denver-based web development firm that owns and manages the Understrap open-source project. Today, I’m excited to share an inside look at how I’ve trained my team to become Understrap pros – and built a system that allows us to rapidly onboard new developers and ensure everyone is building high-quality, handcrafted sites that rock our clients’ worlds and bring in plenty of profit for the company.

When I first started out, some people told me that you can’t systematize the creation of a handcrafted site – “it’s more of an art than a science,” they’d say. I didn’t buy it. I knew that with the right focus on education, we could grow in a way that ensured every developer would become an expert in record time, even if they didn’t have Understrap experience on their resumé.

And so, my team and I embarked on a mission to build the world’s best training for creating custom WordPress themes. Understrap was a natural choice as a simple, flexible and lightweight theme framework that combines Bootstrap and Underscores, two of our favorite resources. When we started our education project, we didn’t know that we’d soon have the chance to acquire the Understrap project in its entirety – and in May 2021, we jumped at that opportunity. We’re now the owners and managers of Understrap, and our full-time professional development team is dedicated to roadmapping and improving the Understrap software for years to come.

We’ve spent years developing our internal training tools, and we’re excited to share them with you for the first time today. Like you, this was something we knew we should create for ourselves, but it was always at the bottom of a crowded to-do list, constantly displaced by urgent client requests and the need to keep cash flowing every month.

Finally, we took the leap and invested tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into solving The Training Problem for our team once and for all. Today, we’re thrilled to share the results with you – our official starter guide to building handcrafted WordPress sites with Understrap...