Get to know Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with “sketch”) in today’s speaker interview.

Sallie first got online in 1985, via the mainframe at Brown University. She founded an online journal in 1993 and built her first HTML website in 1994. Since discovering WordPress in 2005, she hasn’t looked back. Sallie became the organizer of the East Bay WordPress Meetup in Oakland, California, in 2009.

Sallie has produced WordPress videos for Peachpit Press, taught introductory WordPress classes for Mediabistro, and acted as Technical Reviewer for O’Reilly’s WordPress: The Missing Manual. She runs her WP Fangirl consulting and development business from her home in Oakley, which she shares with her husband and two cats.

What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?

Let’s see. I don’t think the bio mentions that the reason I first started publishing online was that I was a classicist specializing in Greek and Roman theater in modern performance. I learned Greek before I learned HTML, and I keep telling myself that if I could learn Greek, I can learn JavaScript. It’s not that human languages and computer languages are similar; the point is that I’ve mastered difficult things before. The electronic journal that I started in the ’90s is still around over at http://www.didaskalia.net, though I haven’t been involved with it for many years. I think having a humanities background helps me relate to clients. Also, I think building a website is probably more like producing a play than it is like creating a brochure.

We’re very obviously comparing apples to oranges here, or maybe apples to shoes, but now that you’ve studied both, do you consider learning Greek or PHP more difficult?

Human languages are much more complex than computer languages. In PHP there are three ways to write a conditional, and all of them are a combination of indicative and imperative. In classical Greek there are three present, three past, and three future conditional forms, in the indicative, subjunctive, and optative. Not to mention the fact that with Greek you start as if you were in first grade again, just learning the letters of the alphabet.

But as a counter to that, there’s the fact that you can speak a foreign language badly and be understood. Human languages have redundancy built into them and they also have humans to interpret them. If you use the wrong punctuation in an English sentence, pedants like me will be annoyed, but we’ll know what you meant. If you use the wrong punctuation in PHP, you get a fatal error. The computer doesn’t know what you mean unless you get it exactly right.

I absolutely love the idea of considering a website more akin to a play than to a brochure — code is poetry after all. Could you expand on this idea a bit?

Live theater involves complex interactions between the actors, who all have to work together in order for it to work. WordPress websites are the same: you have themes and plugins that have to work properly with WordPress core and each other in order to bring the site together as a whole. And plays are responsive: you have to adapt your production to the space that you’re working in. And neither would be complete without the audience.

Tell us about your cats: What are your their names, breeds, and personalities?

Their names are Bece and Kiki. They’re lynx points–what you get if you cross a tabby cat with a Siamese. Bece is president of Attention Seekers Anonymous, and you’ll find her stealing the show on WP-Tonic Live on Saturday mornings. I call Kiki “Velcro Kitty” because she climbs onto my shoulders and sticks there even if I get up and walk around. They were originally my mother’s cats, but she married a man with a spaniel that thought it was a pit bull, so my husband and I had to fly out to Cleveland and bring them back with us. Here’s a photo of the two as kittens, when they still lived with my mother, and one taken more recently.

Bece and Kiki

What is WP Fangirl?

It’s actually the second name I chose for my WordPress business. The first one had “WordPress” in it, and Jen Mylo politely informed me that was a trademark violation, which I should have known. I am a huge fan of WordPress, so I ended up with WP Fangirl. I’m still trying to think of what the heck to do for a logo, though.

Okay, but aside from the name, what is the business of WP Fangirl?

I build WordPress websites for businesses and non-profits, with a focus on helping them achieve their goals. Most of my work is custom theme development and creating functionality to support content strategy.

What’s the strangest problem you’ve ever considered WordPress for or actually used WordPress to solve?

That’s a tough one. Most of the projects I’ve done were pretty well-suited to WordPress; I’m not likely to take a job on if it’s not within my area of expertise. The strangest thing I’ve seen recently is an HTML site that used to be a WordPress blog. The client’s IT staff actually created a system where content is written in Markdown and exported to HTML, and each of the HTML files is an index.html inside a series of folders that mimic the permalink structure from the previous WordPress install. It’s now my job to turn it back into WordPress, and the import hasn’t been a particularly smooth process.

When presented with a new project, is there any particular red flag or quality of the project that immediately makes you think “NOT WordPress!”?

It’s rare that it’s an immediate response, unless the prospect tells me they have a budget of $200. It’s more a matter of finding out what they really need and what they’re trying to accomplish, as well as what they’re willing to invest in a website in terms of time and effort. Some people don’t need or want everything WordPress has to offer. You can build a site that’s a single landing page with WordPress, but should you?

Get out to WordCamp Los Angeles 2016 and catch Sallie’s presentation, Is WordPress the Best Tool for This Job?, on Saturday, Septermber 10, at 1:30pm in the Blue Whale.