The very coolest thing about migrating to Wordpress as a fundamental Web design and development platform is the timely social element. My very favorite word is synergy – when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When I work within the Wordpress community there are simply thousands of smart people working alongside me. I am free to concentrate on empowering my clients and developing a custom theme, while I can tap a vast well of collective resources to add individual site-specific features as plugins.

Joost de Valk is a Dutch WordPress developer and an online marketer, blogging at Yaost.com. As I work here on the rollout of my own site I intend to document the process, pointing out some of the best solutions I discover, test and apply. Joost’s blog is a continuously valuable resource for tips, tools and plugins that he develops. His Sociable plugin is considered by many people to be the finest way to add social media buttons to your posts. The buttons include all of the top social bookmarking and commenting sites as well as the capacity to e-mail, create a pdf or print – so this one plugin covers all sorts of ground.

I am starting this project with a plain “vanilla” theme entitled Frugal by Eric Hamm. He includes a lot of encouragement and documentation with the theme in hopes that you will try modifying it and learn more about the art of coding. I just added in my own logo and will continue to grow this project right before your eyes.