People I Have Worked With in Kansas City

Since I have starting working on websites here in Kansas City, I have had the chance to work with a lot of local tech people. And since I was freelancing here for a bit and have not decided to shut that part of my business off at least currently, I thought I could send some people in the right direction if they need web design work in Kansas City.

I have decided that freelancing is like having a day job and boss for each client you have and not ever hour spent freelancing. So instead I will be putting in full-time hours at the day job and doing my own thing on the side. It’s amazing how the outlook changes when you are building something that is your own idea and start writing again.

So here are a few local and not so local people who may be available to get some work done for you here in Kansas City.

Adam Russell

Adam came in shortly after I started work on my first Magento site. Magento was a learning process, and I wasn’t quite sure then what I was getting myself into. I had yet to have a clue about the file structure and just looking at the themes, I knew creating a custom one would be a job. However, Adam took the job on and created a custom theme for All About Doors and Windows multipoint locks site. It has since been a bit muddied by too many cooks, I think, but it’s a great theme.

Adam was not only a great designer but knew just about everything that could be known about computers and technology. There was not much I could show him. He knew a lot. You can find Adam at Room/One-Eleven Design.

Ryan Jennings

Ryan Jennings is a great Flash designer and ASP developer. He also knows a bit about Magento, since he and I built two complete Magento sites here with over 20,000 products. Ryan caught onto to SEO and link building right away, driving many of the sites he worked on to the top of the search engine results.

You can find Ryan at his Kansas City barter site.

Steve Kohlmeyer

Steve I just starting working with me a few months ago and he’s still here. He knows PHP and is a great coder. He is also quickly learning the ins and outs of Magento, OsCommerce and Wordpress. And I have had a few months to work on him, so he now has the blogging bug. I told him to simply write a post about anything he spent over 15 minutes searching for on Google and use your queries in your post.

It seems to be working and his new kansas city tech blog was getting targeted search engine visitors the first week.

Derek Miller

Derek already had his own online business when he came here, selling sports cards online. He can also write MySql queries that I have to break into bite-size chunks to understand. He also once won $10,000 in a few months playing online poker. Put these skills together and send them in the right direction, and you have the perfect analytical SEO. Which is ironic, since he was wondering how to get more traffic to his site when he started here.

So he started working with our Google Analytics account. Soon he had a Filemaker database with our most valuable words, where we ranked, and what pages had to be focused on to rank higher.

Jessie Cabbage

Jessie does not live here in the Kansas City area, but she is a great content writer and SEO. Over the weekend, I wrote a upcoming post for Search Engine Journal. It has been a while since I really had hit publish anywhere though I have been writing, as you will see, starting Friday. I know I have been sloppy in the past, hitting publish the instant I was done with no editing. So I asked Jesse to read through my post and check for issues.

I got back a detailed list of the issues in my post along with the spelling, grammar and style rules I was breaking. Thanks Jessie.