b5media

May 28th,2007

Welcome, Mark Jaquith!

By Mark

One of the most exciting parts of a start-up is building a team and finding people who have the skills and passion to help you succeed. It’s not always an easy process but when you find the right person, it’s huge. This is why we’re so pleased to announce the hiring of Wordpress ninja Mark Jaquith. For anyone not familiar with Mark, he’s one of the world’s leading Wordpress developers who has played a major role in the creation of new Wordpress features.

As b5media’s Aaron Brazell says, “He doesn’t just know WordPress; he helped to create much of it. His intimate knowledge of what WordPress can do is what made him so desirable [to b5]”.

The process to hire Mark started in February when b5 decided it was time to beef up our technology team. The key issues were what kind of people we wanted/needed to hire, and what kind of people we wanted to attract in terms of skills, personality, etc. We reached out to Mark, although we weren’t sure he was willing to “go corporate” given his Wordpress and online consulting business was do so well. Much to our surprise, Mark said he was interested, and the process to bring him into b5media began in earnest.

In typical b5 fashion, our “interview” with Mark in Toronto lasted a couple of days, which gave him the opportunity to meet the b5 people, learn more about what makes us tick, and wander around downtown Toronto - a brave act given we were in the midst of winter in Toronto while Mark lives in balmy Florida. We must have made a good impression because Mark left stoked about the opportunity.

Mark’s hiring reflects b5’s strategic focus on extending and enhancing the Wordpress platform, which powers our entire blog network. In addition to the great content written by more than 125 passionate bloggers, our technology platform is one of our most valuable assets.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of exciting projects happening that will enhance our infrastructure and give us the ability to do much more with our network, and move into new businesses. We’re looking forward to seeing Mark and other members of our kick-ass tech team push it forward in new and exciting ways.

To learn more about Mark, check out his blog focused on the Wordpress platform. You can also find out more about Mark’s consulting firm, Covered Web Services, which specializes in personal services for Web site using Wordpress. Cover Web Services offered custom coding, security audits, upgrades and general consulting.