Start your week with Sarah Wefald in today’s speaker interview.
Sarah Wefald came to Zeek the long way. She started out as a project manager at a major record label – the sort of job she had wanted since she had first thought it would be cool to work with musicians, a decision made back when she was president of her high school drama club. However, that dream was soon met with reality in the music industry: half the company worldwide was laid off after the label was purchased and privatized. Determined that her career would not be over at 23, she went back to school while working temp jobs to learn web development and design.
After finishing the program, Sarah started transitioning from her marketing career to more technical work within the music industry, handling social media and webmaster duties for bands. Finding Steve Zehngut’s WordPress meetup group in Orange County allowed her to take her knowledge of PHP and apply it to WordPress web development. As a result, she has created and launched dozens of websites for brands and small businesses on her own, and runs the OC WordPress Web Designer’s meetup at Zeek’s offices on the first Monday of each month. She has presented at WordCamp Los Angeles (2013 and 2014) and WordCamp Orange County (2014), and served on the organizing committee for WordCamp Orange County in 2015 and 2016. She’s very happy that Zeek has allowed her to unite her original love of project management with her enthusiasm for WordPress.
What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?
That pretty much covers it, I think. I like my job and music and the usual stuff like hanging out with friends, and also fun. I guess you could include that I like to knit and crochet? Not terribly rock and roll, but it’s relaxing.
What is the most significant way your career in the music industry (which we are all totes jelly of, btw) prepared you for what you’re doing today?
It taught me how to explain technical things to non-technical people – a typical musician may have trouble figuring out Twitter, let alone WordPress. Breaking it all down into steps that actually have bearing in their daily life of keeping their fans engaged and informed was vital. I also learned how to deal with a lot of big personalities, both in business and in creative.
What was your favorite production from your high school drama club days?
Probably Jane Eyre. It was my first lead role, so of course I loved it, but it was a tough one. Jane had me onstage for 95% of the two-hour showtime, so for the 8 or so weeks of the production, I didn’t do anything but rehearse after school while everyone else who wasn’t in the scene we were running got to socialize. The more informal shows with our improv troupe were more loose and fun.
We’ve all had impossible clients, and stereotypes say musicians/bands are the worst. How do you approach difficult requests from your clients, like non-specific feature requests, plugins that don’t exist, features that are unnecessarily complex, and so on?
Believe it or not, musicians are among the easiest, because they just want you to handle it. They would rather focus on their craft, so you just have to get their (or, more likely, their manager’s) sign-off on the site structure and look and feel matching their album artwork, then go build however you need. The only problem is when you get someone that changes their mind a lot, but even then, it’s not that bad. They get it when you say “I can’t do this within the budget we have, so let’s save this feature for right now and come back to it.”
When we get non-specific or otherwise confusing requests from clients now, I try to back them away from the technological request and into the problem they’re trying to solve. I once spoke to someone who asked me for what would have been a massive multiple-week-long database restructuring, but when we talked about the problem they needed solved instead, it turns out all they needed was to have one default search radius adjusted. The job was done in less than an hour.
What’s the most rewarding part about running the OC WordPress meetup?
Giving back is the most rewarding part. I had some formal design and development training, but for the most part, I’m self-taught. I started going to Steve Zehngut’s general WordPress meetup 5 years ago to learn how to apply what I knew about PHP to this CMS I’d heard so much about. Not long after, I started going to OCWP dev night as well, even though I didn’t understand anything I heard. I just kept coming back and taking notes, and eventually I started making sites: first a stock theme, then a child theme, then a completely custom theme. I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of amazing answers. People were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge, and I tried to keep myself worthy of it by continually getting better at what I was doing, and then doing more of it. Being a meetup host myself is the perfect way to help ensure other people are able to learn the way I was.
Catch Sarah’s presentation, “Yes, and…”: Using improv comedy for project management success, at WordCamp Los Angeles 2016 in Club Alabam at 10:20 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2016 and again at 11:00 AM during the Morning Business Panel (Moderated by Steve Zehngut).