My first exposure to technology and WordPress
In 2011, I was a UI Designer for a US-based technology company. My responsibility included designing our company’s website and creating static HTML pages from my designs. With these fixed static sites, any adjustments, even if it’s changing the same menu across ten pages, I’ll have to modify it page by page. This process is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
However, while I was building a website for my friend, I accidentally discovered WordPress. This content management system is the solution that I have been dreaming of! My excitement kept me up for several nights as I continued exploring and testing this newfound tool. Finally, I was able to create a website without any code that was easy to update and provided interactive elements for my visitors. Being able to create a website by myself in just a few days – bringing my vision to life – it was an unforgettable and precious feeling.
Growing up and how I became a developer
In college, I majored in tourism and originally planned to become a flight attendant. However, during my senior year, a computer elective course changed my life. This course required us to use FrontPage to build a website. This task ignited my passion for web design, and thus began my self-learning journey.
I subsequently devoted a lot of time to reading books and creating many websites, which eventually led me to study in the United States.
I first obtained a master's degree in interactive design from Savannah College of Art and Design and worked as a web designer for several technology companies in the United States. These experiences not only helped me accumulate a strong foundation in design, but it also gave me valuable experience in working with engineers, which laid a good foundation for my future usage of WordPress.
My journey as a female member of the WordPress community
Shortly after I returned to Taiwan to work in 2012, I was going to have a child. At that time, I chose to take unpaid leave to concentrate on giving birth. However, this decision unexpectedly started my entrepreneurial journey for more than ten years, and I never returned to a traditional workplace.
Initially, I built a website for my wedding photographer using WordPress. As word of mouth spread, I built hundreds of websites for clients within six years. In 2018, I started running my own blog WPointer, specializing in easy-to-understand WordPress tutorials, hoping to introduce more people to WordPress – a tool that would help one to build a website easily.
This journey has allowed me to turn my hobby into a career, which has brought me a stable income. Thanks to the flexibility of working from home, I have successfully balanced my career and family life. Being able to personally accompany my children as they grow up is what I feel most fortunate and satisfied about.
Hopes for my future and the WordPress community
Although Taiwan's WordPress community has grown continuously in recent years and has successfully held many medium to large-scale WordCamp events, the number of members of Taiwan's largest Facebook community still does not exceed 40,000. I hope to continue creating more tutorials suitable for WordPress beginners, and at the same time attract people from different industries and ages through more diverse media, so that more people can experience the power of using WordPress.
In addition, I also plan to develop a series of advanced WordPress courses to help interested learners deeply understand the diverse scalability of WordPress and use various plug-ins to enrich and expand their business.
My advice to women looking to work in tech
If you are eager to have flexible working hours and want to take care of your family and career at the same time, consider starting a business with WordPress! With WordPress, even if you don’t know programming or design, you can still easily create diverse websites through various themes and plug-ins to start your online career journey.
Compared to traditional entrepreneurship, the technical requirement and cost of setting up a WordPress website are relatively lower. If you keep an open mind, continue to acquire new knowledge, and actively participate in various tech communities, you will be pleasantly surprised to find many women like you who are also using WordPress to start a business and working hard to find work-life balance. As women, we should encourage a
