WordPress Developer with PHP

Anywhere  ‐ Remote
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Description

Red Earth Design, Inc. is a woman-owned distributed company - there is no office and all team members work remotely. The team consists of five full and part-time project managers, PHP and CSS coders, web maintainers, and graphic designers, several of whom have worked together for more than 10 years.

We specialize in supporting graphic designers for building out their designs, non-profits, such as environmental education organizations and animal rescues, and small businesses - organizations on a budget. We help people helping the world.

Our main focus is building out WordPress websites and providing ongoing support and maintenance. Our most important values are really caring about the people we are working with and our tenacity in solving problems. We listen, we're accessible and patient, and we make things work. We train clients on how to use their website in an empowering way.

Work/life balance is a top priority. We share the work amongst ourselves so we all have enough time and flexibility for the most important things in life.

Job Description
We are looking for a WordPress-oriented PHP and CSS coder / programmer / web developer to join our team for 30-40 hours a week. Contract work (no benefits, will receive a 1099), but not temporary. Starting hourly rate $23/hr. with opportunity to increase with added responsibility.

Work from anywhere. No office, no commute. Most communication is done via email and a project/task management tool with occasional phone calls. Hours are flexible but the majority of your available time needs to overlap with US business hours for timely client interactions.

Your main responsibility would be to work with WordPress, WooCommerce, CSS, and various plugins to create reliable results for our clients. Red Earth clients are creative and passionate and come up with all sorts of interesting ideas and ways to do things – it’s never boring. Our job is to figure out the best tools for the job, listen to clients well, make things work for them, document well, and test thoroughly. First priority is caring about people – both clients and team members, and the code is just a tool to do that.

This position is open to anyone anywhere. No computer science degree required. PHP, CSS, and WordPress proficiency is required. Our team would like to work with a programmer who is modest and easy to get along with.

We are looking for someone that can really take the lead on a WordPress multi-site project with several WooCommerce and other plugin interactions going on. The foundation and functionality is already in place, so it’s a matter of fine-tuning existing software, adding new features, maintaining the plugin upgrades, answering questions from client admins about how to update this or that, and in general being the main go-to person. A thorough orientation of the software and admin info will be provided. Then secondary to that, someone that is on hand to help the team with other update requests that come in from other clients.

The position begins with a 2 week paid orientation and trial period with a check-in at the end to decide if it's working for you and working for us. Either party reserves the right to end the trial period at any time.

Required Skills/Experience
  • Experience using WordPress: editing pages, posts, widgets, menus, plugins
  • HTML, FTP
  • CSS, Responsive CSS
  • PHP arrays and foreach loops
  • MySQL
  • Ability to solve problems with minimal direction
  • High degree of learning agility / fast and interested learner
  • Ability to interact with clients and team in a kind, respectful and professional manner
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills
  • Self-motivated, self-starter
  • Uses time efficiently
  • Patient, positive and supportive attitude with clients and team members


  • Preferred Additional Skills/Experience
  • Experience with WordPress installations, configuration, child themes, security
  • WooCommerce
  • WordPress multi-site
  • Troubleshooting plugin bugs and conflicts
  • Email account POP3/IMAP connections/set-up
  • jQuery
  • XML, JSON
  • APIs


  • Initial Responsibilities
  • Content updates on WordPress sites
  • Plugin installation, configuration
  • CSS updates
  • Testing


  • Target Responsibilities
  • Part of the time you’ll work with a project manager to make updates or help on a project. Another part of the time you’ll work directly with a client to make updates
  • Project lead/main contact for some projects, including new builds and ongoing maintenance projects
  • Delegation of project tasks to other team members if you need help testing, review, or approaching something
  • Plugin troubleshooting/problem solving
  • CSS/template builds – take a Photoshop file and apply the styles to a WordPress child theme, work with PHP and WordPress child theme templates to set up custom features as needed
  • Taking screenshots and writing out steps/instructions for clients to file for doing updates on their site specific to a plugin or other non-standard functionality


  • Examples of tasks:
  • We receive a Photoshop file of a design for a website. The site is already installed and a child theme set up. You would update the theme settings, child theme stylesheet, and template files to match the design.
  • Client has WooCommerce installed and would like the SKU to display on the category page in addition to where it shows on the product detail page. You would check our Evernote internal knowledge base and do other searches if needed to find a WooCommerce filter and function and add it to their functions file.
  • Client needs a way to display additional information blocks on a webpage, such as tabs. Each tab has a title and then content they see once they click on the tab title. You would install a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields with Repeater field types, and set up a field group for tabs and assign it to the specific page or post type. Then you would update the child theme template to display these fields for that page or post type.
  • We’ve added a custom post type “People” to a client’s site so they can maintain bios and information about their staff, speakers, and others involved with their organization. We’ve added the main People archive page link to the navigation menu, but when you go to the page, it doesn’t show as the current page and highlight it or the parent page in the menu. To solve for this, you would find another example in our internal knowledge base, and copy and update the jQuery to work for this site. Or if you’re not familiar with jQuery, you would create a new task for a RED team member who is familiar with jQuery to handle this update or to mentor you in learning how.
  • Client or team member posts that X is broken, and you first try to replicate the problem, and then track down the issue and fix it.
    You’re ready to launch a website. First you go through our pre-launch checklist and involve other team members in a peer review and cross browser check, then you would go through our launch checklist. At the end of any process, if you notice places in documentation or steps that could be better, you discuss with the team and we integrate improvements as we go.
  • Participate in a ‘Professional Development Friday’ time, where we each take the opportunity to learn about something we’ve been wanting to, and share it back to the group.


  • Required Tools
  • Internet connection
  • Phone number clients can call with professional voicemail recording and quiet background environment (email account will be provided)
  • Photoshop CS 5.x or any version supporting grouped layers
  • Rapid PHP or a similar PHP editing platform is suggested


  • This is a sample of a few tasks the trial period will likely include:
  • Editing content in a WordPress site
  • Set up a child theme on an installed WordPress site and edit the templates and CSS to match a design example
  • Testing a series of custom features in a site


  • To apply, please answer the following application questions:
  • Name
  • Email
  • Location
  • What about working with Red Earth Design intrigues you? Why are you interested in this job in particular?
  • Tell us one thing you did that seemed impossible, and what happened?
  • Tell us about some of your experiences with WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, and CSS, and/or share examples of your work.
  • Attach a resume


  • How to apply?
    Accepting application responses and resumes. Phone interviews start in October.
    Start date
    ASAP
    From
    Red Earth Design, Inc.
    Published at
    25.09.2014
    Contact person:
    Freelancer Map
    Project ID:
    781166
    Contract type
    Freelance
    Workplace
    100 % remote
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