Stephen Sherrard
Background
I’m basically a computer geek that taught myself assembly language programming on a Radio Shack computer in the early 80s. I studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in the late 80s, and then served as a Nuclear Power Engineering Officer in the Navy for 5 years after college.
I then took a detour, combining my love of electronics & music, and broke into the recording industry professionally (after performing and recording for many years as a serious hobby since a young age). I worked on staff at a major recording studio for several years while building up my own business on the side, and eventually my own professional recording studio. These days I mostly focus on professional mixing via the internet, or in person, and have won some awards for my mixing.
I made my way back to programming in 2012 when I volunteered to be the webmaster for my son’s school PTA web site. The site was in desperate need of a major overhaul, and I was looking for a solution that would allow the various PTA volunteers (i.e., other parents) the ability to easily update their own program pages, and do things like create volunteer sign-up sheets, without having to send requests to the webmaster and wait for them to find the time to make the changes. WordPress seemed like it would be the perfect platform for this with it’s easy page/post editing and the huge variety of themes and plugins available.
Unfortunately, after many weeks of searching, I couldn’t find any plugins that fit all of our needs exactly. So, I decided to brush off my programming skills and spent the summer learning all about the inner workings of WordPress and the PHP/MySQL code behind it. By the end of the summer, I had a pretty elaborate PTA Manager system ready to go. The 2013/2014 school year was the real world test for the code, which was refined with feedback and suggestions from other PTA volunteers during the year.
Two plugins were segregated from the system and made more generic to be useful to a larger range of people and released for free at WordPress.org.
I continue to improve and refine those two plugins, as well as create extensions for them which you can find on this site.
This experience also helped me develop some custom WooCommerce plugin extensions for my wife’s luxury cashmere web site, which are also available on this site. I also do all the photography for my wife’s site, as well as some other local designers.
The majority of my work these day is creating custom plugins, especially custom extensions for WooCommerce. I work directly with clients who run their own web sites, as well as sub-contracting my services through other web development companies.
The first big custom project I landed was for a Canadian development company, and we created a very large custom plugin for an auto parts site that now has around 200,000 products. The plugin included several custom product import and update functions, allowing the owner to quickly import or update large number of parts at once. I also developed a tiered pricing system for him (parts of which later became the foundation for the User Role Pricing plugin I sell here), and an jQuery/Ajax based custom part finder system, along with several other custom features.
Other custom projects have included a custom one page tabular style wholesale order form (that works with my existing Wholesale Ordering and User Role Pricing plugins, and which I am also trying to make generic enough to release as a extension here), as well as a custom one page, jQuery/Ajax based combined WooCommerce order form and cart system for another client.
Keep checking back for more!
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need help with anything!