JessePetersen.com - ready for traffic!

I’ve been working hard, too hard in some family members’ minds, on my freelance site over the last two weeks. Now that it’s done, I can relax and reap the rewards for a job very well done.

I am in a very unique position at iThemes in that I am the front line of contact with our customers, not just one of the front line. There are only so many things that we offer for support that is included in the price of our premium WordPress themes. We can’t train someone from scratch how to use WordPress or learn enough CSS and HTML code to change their site. We offer answers to specific questions, but projects need to be directed elsewhere.

For the last couple of months, I have been directing them my way for some literal moonlighting. I typically start my second work day around 9-10pm and work until midnight on projects. It’s great money, creates networking contacts, and makes iThemes to be an all-around solution, even if one has to pay for certain services.

It became rather tedious, though, to reply to someone that they can contact a moderator or myself for services and write a long e-mail about my services and fees and hope they e-mailed me back on my personal e-mail. Since I’d been holding on to JessePetersen.com for about 15 months waiting to finally develop some content, I decided to make it about promoting me and what I do rather than me forcing myself into writing or producing material. Now I can simply refer people to my namesake domain (I sure hope they spell both names right later) and they can see that I am the real deal with testimonials and links to prove it. Not to mention the theme I’m running – /horn toot!

I’m quite proud of what I did at the bottom of my home page, though I openly admit that my wife had a LOT of very constructive and helpful suggestions about certain elements of the home page and it now passes with flying colors in her very distinguishing design opinion. Please check out that little area and the hover action on the guy, especially. I’d have to say I’m more proud of the bird and my graphic and code work putting that together, but the Image is Everything ad is definitely my best marketing work to date.

Customized code turned these from text areas to this!

This is actually our latest iThemes release, and the first of 2009 for our rapidly expanding group of 2009 Theme Club customers. By purchasing the Club package, customers are entitled to every theme we produce this calendar year, so the release of this theme, called Architect (demo site here), produced a new wave of sign-ups today. My fingers were quite busy creating new member site logins for their download access since the value of receiving our premium themes at less than $35 per multi-use license them is $100 off per theme! The more themes we produce over our promised number reduces the cost per theme to the customer even more.