Today I start a new gig.  I’ll be teaming up with Alex King (of WordPress fame) to manage the WordPress HelpCenter.  During the past several years I’ve had increasing interest in working with WordPress full-time.  It started with me developing themes and plugins for my own site then branched into customizations for clients and over the past roughly 2 years has nearly grown into full-time work providing WordPress services.  Today it finally becomes my full-time endeavor.

That’s not even the interesting part though.  When I first heard about WordPress HelpCenter, the idea of it alone struck me as something I could believe in.  The basic idea is that you can receive on demand support for your WordPress powered site.  The “on demand” piece is key.  Many of us have been working in a typical client/service provider relationship for years now.  The client puts in a request, we receive it, perform an action, get sign off, deploy.  Depending on the request and the current project load of the service provider this process could take awhile, sometimes days or even weeks.

WordPress HelpCenter is different.  With the HelpCenter there is a phone number that you can dial, 303-395-1346.  Calling that number will put you on the phone with a WordPress expert, ready to help you with your request, whether it’s how to turn off comments for a post, customizing a theme/plugin for your site, or just about any other WordPress related item you can think of.

But wait, there’s more! ;)

WordPress theme and plugin developers can sign up for the Affiliate Program.  Whenever we help a user with a support request concerning your theme or plugin, you can earn cash.  We’ll also help you with bug reports.  If we identify a bug that can be reproduced we’ll send you a detailed bug report along with steps on how to reproduce it so that you can work on a fix for it.  You can also get plugins, badges, links, and more to help direct your users to the HelpCenter that already have your affiliate code in them.  This free’s you of some of the support requests and allows you more time to produce quality code while still knowing that your users are being taken care of.  I’d highly recommend registering your themes and plugins if you haven’t already.

This is obviously something I’m excited about and I look forward to seeing the service grow.