Member spotlight on Hannah Smith
What’s your name
Hannah Smith
What do you do with WordPress
I mainly build and support sites for SMEs (small to medium enterprises). Over the past three years I have also instructed courses in Bristol aimed at developers wanting to learn WordPress, mainly through developme.training.
What’s your involvement with Bristol WordPress People?
I’ve been regularly attending the group since 2015 and between 2016 and 2019 was group secretary. I’ve now stepped down as a group organiser but am still very much a part of the community.
I first starting attending because I needed to learn about WordPress. I have always found the meet-ups great for sign posting me to features or tools that I hadn’t heard of before. I soon found myself helping to organise the group and became enthralled with the Bristol WordPress community but also the community wider afield. I now consider many of the people I have met through the group as good friends. My WordPress skills are more advanced now so I continue to attend to pay back some of the knowledge I took from the group, and to socialise and network.
What’s your job
A freelance WordPress developer.
How have you been long using WP
I did my first freelance project using WordPress in December 2014.
Any sites you’ve built that you’d like to share?
My favourite site is pieminister.co.uk, for a few reasons. They make fabulous pies, which I have always loved ever since they first started business in 2003. They’re also a great Bristol brand who have stayed to true to their roots and are absolutely lovely people to work with. They came to me with a site and online shop that hadn’t been updated in nearly two years. It’s been great working steadily with them over time to get the site’s performance better (we’ve still got a lot to do!), makeover the site so it’s on brand and continue to support the marketing team with the things they want the site to do.
Another one of my favourites is itic.co, another Bristol based firm. I love this website because I think the design is very clean and simple. It also draws the majority of the site’s content in form a third party system using APIs which was a lot of fun to build.
And one more… repair.eu. Many of you will know that the environment and sustainability are things very close to my heart. I was delighted when I got to build this site as I think the organisation is doing truly wonderful work. They raise awareness about how so many of our electronics end up in landfill because they are not designed to be repaired and are pushing for legislation changes around Europe to stop this. The site was a quick and cheap build and was one of the first builds I did using 100% Gutenberg. I also support a few sites for one of their main partners therestartproject.org who are also absolutely brilliant. I wish I had the time to arrange a repair party here in Bristol because I know we’d love it here.
Favourite WordPress feature / plugin
It’s got to be Advanced Custom Fields. I think Elliot Condon deserves a medal for that plugin, especially as the plugin allows you to create Gutenberg blocks so easily. I use it on every single site I build and support – it’s an absolute must!
Anything you’d like to see in WordPress?
More conversation and discussion about the impact (both good and bad) of WordPress on the environment and how WordPress could play a role in tackling climate change. I think there are some people in the WordPress community who realise that the internet and poorly performing sites do have an environmental impact, but I would like to see more consideration paid to it in all aspects of the open source project.
Tell us something that people might not know about you
The main reason I am a freelancer is so I can take time out to travel and enjoy the great outdoors. My main passion is snowboarding and for the last three winters I have been away in the Italian Dolomites, nestled deep in mountainous valleys getting my groove on with nature.