In this post, I will draw back the curtain of what makes Codeable unique and let you know why we believe that Codeable is still a “best-kept secret” from many and the default freelance marketplace of choice for all your WordPress needs.

A Freelance Platform of a New Kind

The Codeable story began like many stories of two aspiring creators — meeting under serendipitous circumstances and united in a common belief that together they could make a tiny dent in the universe by building something that made the world even slightly better than before. Spoiler alert: They did it.

It all began over a decade ago, in a “home office” much like the humble beginnings of Disney, Apple, Dell, Amazon, or even Nike; two creators, Per Esbensen and Tomaž Zaman, started building the framework of a dream that was Codeable.

These two co-founders shared inadequate experiences using freelance platforms (one as an expert, the other as a client). While many such marketplaces were already built and thriving, Per and Tomaž knew they could, or more accurately, that they needed to build Codeable differently, starting at its very foundation. Together they envisioned a two-sided marketplace of experts and clients with the company’s focus to be a place where they would be happy and return because of it.

Codeable was born on the foundations of being human-centric, people first, and where experts would happily produce high-quality work, and clients would constantly return.

A decade later, Co-Founder and CEO Per Esbensen reminisces:

“Many people, in the early days, told us how difficult or impossible it would be to make our dream of Codeable successful; thankfully, we proved many of them wrong.

– Per Esbensen

The Codeable Way: Trust and Quality

As Tomaž developed what would become the first version of the Codeable platform, Per worked in agencies to help support this dream. In October 2014, out of a small office in Copenhagen, Codeable was launched and officially introduced to the world.

Knowing that most startups fail, they were determined to ensure Codeable was too good to fail by ensuring its solid foundations were built more by their shared values of trust and heart than by just code.

“I think it’s important to have a clear vision and values and to stay focused on those as you grow the business. And it’s important to build a great team with people who share your vision and values. And finally, it’s important to be persistent and be patient and also to stay committed to your goals even when things get tough.”

– Per Esbensen

Today, Codeable stands tall as one of the foremost WordPress marketplaces that one can trust to offer the quality it promises.

The unique Codeable way is in a marketplace where highly vetted quality experts are chosen to join a community of peers over the battlefield of competitors.

They understood the importance of creating a healthy work environment, valuing quality over quantity, and building trust with clients in the often chaotic world of freelance marketplaces – the cornerstone of the Codeable way.

Value-Built Freelance Marketplace

Undeniably, Codeable is a platform with a surgically refined set of features created by the development team. The company’s values are conveyed even in the code and features that run the Codeable platform.

How Codeable is built as a platform, both by its feature set and people-first culture, is the defining force that has Codeable stand tallest amongst the noise of other freelance platforms.

When asked to name the top three things that are key focuses in Codeable’s success, now and in the future, Per Esbensen outlined:

• Prioritizing people’s well-being (experts and employees) as a major factor allowing them to produce high-quality work and ultimately returning and satisfied clients.
• Continuously striving for excellence and investing in knowledge-sharing with continuous improvement as a key quality in the expert community mindset and culture – helped along by a growing Codeable expert Academy as a primary resource.
• Consistently enhance working relationships between experts to create even more amazing work by building high morale, and a loyal and happy culture within the expert community, which equally enhances the experience of the clients who work with us and keep coming back.

Peace of Mind

Understanding how stressful and chaotic it can be for clients and experts who have experiences on other freelance platforms, Codeable decided that peace of mind should be baked into the foundation.

These are some of the attributes of the Codeable way that aims to do just that:

• Our experts follow a rigorous vetting process to meet the quality standard. Only about 2% of all applicants make it onto the platform, and with careful quality control, we keep only the best.
• We offer a minimum pricing range ($80-120/hr); while offering an estimate system over the traditional bidding system (there are no price wars or bidding to the bottom). This way, experts can comfortably charge their worth, and the client can choose which fine experts to move forward with. Happy experts, happy clients.
• Our escrow service offers peace of mind to the client and the expert; projects are funded initially and only released to the expert once the client explicitly marks the work as complete and satisfactory.
• Professional and empathetic Codeable support agents are available whenever you need help or reassurance to ensure you and your expert achieve success together.
• We also offer an industry-leading 28-day warranty period once the work has been delivered. Should there be any issues or concerns, our experts and support staff will ensure they are resolved according to the project scope.

The Codeable WordPress Marketplace

Codeable stands out from its competitors with its focus on quality rather than quantity, top-notch services, excellent client satisfaction rates, premium pricing models for superior quality, and global developers. Choose Codeable for peace of mind with your next WordPress project.

With highly trusted experts and a support team always eager to help you move your project forward: Codeable is your freelance marketplace of choice.

Once you consider the rare combined factors that make Codeable such a unicorn among WordPress freelance platforms – from its people-focused beginnings, its high standards of experts in its community, its culture of trust and quality, the undeniable leadership from heart by Per Esbensen, and the great clients who are equally as great as we strive to be – it becomes a fools errand finding comparable competitors.

This is why Codeable is a best-kept secret, a secret you should definitely share.

The post Why choose Codeable to hire WordPress developers over other freelance platforms? appeared first on Codeable.

Expanding and developing the Codeable Expert community is central to everything that we do at Codeable, as we build out the network of talent to work with the growing number of clients and partner organizations that we have.

Related to this, we’re excited to have Mike Demopoulos (aka MikeDemo) joining the team as Expert Community Development Lead, working as part of the existing Expert Community team headed up by Chris Churchill. Mike’s an experienced hand when it comes to building developer communities, most recently with BoldGrid and InMotion Hosting, as well as being very familiar with WordPress and Open Source generally. Mike will be leading the activity to expand the Codeable Expert community by helping to bring the best WordPress developers and engineers onto the Codeable platform and spreading the Codeable word. With over 550 existing Codeable Experts on the platform, including both individual developers and small teams, we’re already built the largest specialist WordPress development services community and platform. Mike’s arrival will help us to accelerate and expand our Expert community building activity, and this will happen side-by-side with our Expert community management activities as we continue to create the best environment for Codeable Experts.

Separately, expanding, developing and managing the Codeable Partner community and network is also core to what we do here are Codeable, working across a network of amazing WordPress plugin and theme publishers, hosts, specialist content publishers, and agencies.

Related to this, we’re excited to have Christie Chirinos (@xtiechirinos) joining the team as Partner Community Development Lead. Christie has deep experience within the WordPress ecosystem, having been the co-founder of a WordPress-based business (Caldera Forms, acquired by Saturday Drive), worked most recently with hosting company Nexcess / Liquid Web (on their managed WooCommerce offering), and is a regular speaker at WordCamp’s and on any number of WordPress-related podcasts! Christie will be leading the activity to manage, develop and grow the Codeable partner community and network. We already act as a trusted referral destination for hundreds of partners, and we’ll be continuing to nurture and develop these relationships, including expanding the range of ways that we work with partners. We’ll also be working to build new partner relationships and to create new partner channels and types of partnerships. Christie’s arrival will help us to take our partner program to the next level, as we continue to both build Codeable’s reach and work to provide partners with a valuable and trusted destination for referrals (as well as creating new partnership opportunities).

So we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Christie and Mike to the Codeable team. Welcome to you both!

PS We’ll be continuing to build the team, with the next addition being a Head of Growth Marketing. So if that’s your thing, and you like what we’re doing here at Codeable, please get in touch!

The post Developing the Codeable Expert Community & Partner Community operations appeared first on Codeable.

Fast forward to a little over a year ago and we accidentally crossed paths again. We started talking about the business and I quickly realized Codeable had already outgrown that vision. They agreed. 

That’s when I joined Codeable — with the goal of bringing the brand and website up to speed. The existing brand identity and website failed to communicate the real Codeable. There was a disconnect between the brand, the spirit of the company and the level of service it delivered. Potential clients were misinterpreting what Codeable was, how it worked and how it was different from others.

Fast forward to today and we’ve got a new brand and website to share with you. Yes, it took a whole year 🙂 Find out why below.

Definitely more than outsourcing WordPress development

We set to address the rebrand by rearticulating our key narrative and positioning. It was a long, challenging process and it almost felt like the business equivalent of a midlife crisis. It took a lot of introspection and asking the hard questions. Why did we start this in the first place? What’s our purpose? Why do partners, experts, and clients choose to work with us and return to Codeable? What’s different now and what has remained the same since we started?

Codeable started with small customization tasks, but today our experts work on projects of any scope and size —  from one-off short-term tasks to complex long-term contract projects. While in the early days we serviced mostly small business owners, today we work with businesses of all shapes and sizes — from solopreneurs to agencies and enterprises with mission-critical websites. 

Apart from our scope of services and customers changing, our articulation of visions and beliefs also had to move beyond outsourcing:

• Our mission to unlock distributed talent, create equal opportunities, and enable both clients and freelancers to thrive in an environment based on trust.
• Our belief in building the most vibrant and diverse WordPress service community in the world, where WordPress professionals can develop together, learn from each other and create connections that can last a lifetime with both clients and fellow experts.
• Our belief that there is a better way for businesses and WordPress professionals to collaborate remotely — a way that values quality, community, trust and care over competing on the lowest price.

Those were always things we fought for and believed in, but we used to describe them with the word “outsourcing.” Now we encourage everyone involved in the platform to “build with heart.”

The new identity: a variable logo mark for flexibility, diversity, and connection

Our new variable mark represents the variable nature of the platform and epitomizes how we connect the right client with the right developer to always deliver a seamless experience for both parties. The shapes in our logo can be different, just like our clients and experts are different, but always come together to build something great.

We take it a step further by extending the shape across patterns, image clipping masks, animations, iconography and other decoration elements for an ever-present and consistent brand feel.

A people first art direction for people first relationships

We are in the business of connecting humans to do quality work together remotely. To showcase the importance of creating authentic human connections, we’ve put photos of humans front and center in our visual language.

A contrasting color palette and bold typography – confident and premium, yet friendly and approachable

Our primary font can be both dressed-up and editorial or casual and approachable, just like interaction on the platform is both playful and serious. The calming deep blue contrasts well with the light peach to create a colorway that evokes a friendly and reliable feel, which also remains confident and premium.

This is just the beginning

We’ve already started rolling out this new identity on parts of our website, ironically this blog is not rebranded yet 🙂 Over the next few months, you’ll see all the other visuals around Codeable aligning around this new direction: on the rest of the website and our blog, in the app, emails and across offline advertising materials and partner sites.

This new brand embodies so much of what is important to our team —  a devotion to community, trust, and care, a love of diversity, and an obsession with quality. We’re confident and proud of the direction we’re heading in and we can safely say that this is just the beginning. We’re still Codeable, but more clear on what we stand for and with some extra space to grow. We can’t wait to see how the brand evolves as we continue to build with heart and take Codeable to the next level.

The post Codeable has a new look appeared first on Codeable.

The brief: playful, but serious

The heart of our photoshoot brief was to showcase the “playful, but serious” essence of Codeable folks. We’re serious about our business, but we do not take ourselves too seriously. We do take work seriously, but we also understand the importance of play and white space in our lives. We’re professional marketers, designers and developers, but we’re also people with our own quirks, interests and hobbies. We are in the business of connecting humans to do quality work together remotely, and we have to be human ourselves. 

The “playful, but serious” concept is something that came up in a brand sprint exercises earlier this year, and we’ve embraced it ever since. It’s something we’ve always been, we now just have the words for it.

In order to showcase all this, we decided to take two portraits each. One traditional, serious corporate shot, the other a shot with a hand-made prop that showcases something unique about our personalities. They will alternate on the new site.

The challenge: 34 portraits in less than 2 hours, no studio

Given our super busy schedule, we had exactly two hours to do all portraits. With 17 people and 2 portraits per person, that gave us around 3.5 mins per person! Going to a studio somewhere in Berlin was not an option, so we had to do it at the conference venue, which also doubled as a hotel. We rented one of the conference rooms at the venue, hired a photographer who brought all of his equipment there, hatched a detailed schedule and off we went! Luckily, all went well, but it was definitely hectic and we learned a thing or two in the process. We thought we’d share some of the lessons learned.

The lessons

• 15 minutes of setup time is not enough when you’re turning a conference room on the 9th floor of a hotel into a studio. In our case, parking at the hotel turned out pretty impossible and our backdrops almost didn’t fit into the elevator. 
• Having a solid, written creative brief for both your photographer and your team is key, especially when you’re super short on time. Make sure to show your photographer what style of photos you like and dislike and do not forget to define the dress code for your team members. Here’s a template that can work for both your team and your photographer with some small modifications.
• As much as you want to go wild with your creative concept, when you’re short on time, you have to keep things simple! Our concept was fairly simple, which allowed us to catch up on the initial delay due to the parking-elevator hitch. 
• Ask your photographer for a detailed photoshoot style guide in writing, so you can have all your new members joining the team do their portraits on their own later. That’s another reason to keep your creative concept simple and easy to replicate regardless of time and location. 
• Never compromise on the quality of the photographer you’re working with. Portraits are especially hard, so make sure you work with professionals you can trust. We had never worked with Norman before, but he was recommended to us and after my initial conversation with him and hearing the questions he asked, I was sure we were in the right hands. 
• Make sure the room you’re going to convert into a studio ticks all the photographer’s requirements. In our case, Norman had room space requirements (at least 15 sq.m empty space), but didn’t care about the lightning of the room, because he was bringing a solid amount of pro lights.
• Brief your photographer about team members in advance: what’s typical about them, what’s their role at the company, where do they come from. Given that our concept was about showcasing two sides of real humans in less than 3 minutes of shooting time, anything that you can do to help the photographer know the person is going to help them do a better job and capture THE shot. 
• Have a schedule indicating who’s being photographed when to avoid multiple people (or even worse – the whole team) being present in the room during individual portraits. We’re not professional models and not everyone is comfortable being photographed, let alone with other people around. So, give your people space and time to get comfortable with the photographer and show their best selves. 
  Have fun and never forget duct tape! You don’t know when your back drop is going to fail you 🙂

Despite the short time we had and the few hiccups, we managed to get it done and both us and the photographer are incredibly happy with the results! We can’t wait to share the portraits with you on our new site! 

Special thanks to Florian Ziegler for documenting the behind the scenes of the portrait session!

The post Capturing the Essence of a Distributed Team – Shooting Portraits for Our New Site appeared first on Codeable.

We just got back from WordCamp Europe and it puts quite the exclamation mark in that “almost.” We are still a relatively small core team, so 17 of our 19 members flew into Berlin from 9 different countries. On top of that, 100+ of our experts, coming from 30 countries, joined us in our largest meetup yet.

Here is more of the why and how the Codeable family gets together.

Taking the Top WordPress Talent Offline

During the 3-4 days of the WordCamp, we constantly run into and spend quality time with experts, but we don’t stop there. On one of the nights, we organize a dinner and intentionally get the whole community together. It’s a special evening, and for many of us, the highlight of our year. It makes working for or on Codeable even more human. We get to meet the human beings behind the names and thumbnail pictures. We spend hours having fun, but also find time to grow professionally. We share drinks and performance numbers (probably a few more of the drinks); we tell jokes and discuss business ideas (definitely a lot more of the jokes). We are what we’ve always been: playful, but serious.

Check out the full photo gallery (Facebook album), work with one of our experts (start a project), or become one of us (apply as an expert).

Collaboration Over Competition

During our WordCamp get togethers, one of the most unique things about Codeable can be seen with the naked eye. While our experts naturally compete on every project that enters the platform, it’s very clear that they do not think of themselves as competitors. On the platform we see experts helping each other out to deliver the highest value possible to clients, in real life we see them hugging and laughing. This is somewhat due to our bidless pricing model, which incentivizes the best project-expert match instead of a bid war. It’s also due to our continuous efforts to run Codeable as a community and as a family. It’s one of the things that sets us apart. It’s a win-win that we see consistently, because collaboration is stronger than lone-wolf competition that defines all other marketplaces we know of.

Check out the full photo gallery (Facebook album), work with one of our experts (start a project), or become one of us (apply as an expert).

The post Getting the Family Together – Codeable’s Meetup at WordCamp Europe 2019 appeared first on Codeable.

Yet, even if we’re already caught up with our inboxes, tickets, and are fighting with our to-do lists day in day out, we’re still thinking about #WCEU 2018. It was so much fun and great to meet with all the people (Codeable experts, friends, and business partners) that we hardly can’t get it out of our head.

Why? One picture will give you enough reasons to understand how deeply WordCamps affect our lives:

Boom, this is the #pinkarmy!

When we talk about “family”, we mean these people and all those who couldn’t make it but are an active part of our community.

You can’t imagine how this impacts the business side of things. And how thankful we are for this great community we’re trying to foster and love so deeply.

Talking about community…

Closing Remark on #WCEU and some stats. So sad it’s over! pic.twitter.com/mJfIcKgkjw

— WP1x1 (@WP1x1) June 16, 2018

WordCamps in general, and this one in Belgrade too, are created, managed, and run by the WordPress community. A community made of different people: business owners, bloggers, developers, designers, teachers, kids, college dropouts, those into sports, those into “couching”, and many more. I mean, it’s incredibly vast and heterogeneous.

That’s the strength of it: people.

And this video recap of how the whole Codeable family experienced WordCamp Europe 2018 shows it perfectly:

Codeable goes to WordCamp Europe 2018

People are what makes everything worth doing.
We need to be more grateful one another.
We need to #HugOn.

See you in Berlin in 2019!

The post WordCamp Europe 2018: A Deep Dive Into People’s Life (Video Inside) appeared first on Codeable.

That’s why the market is going crazy about automation tools and, to an extent, about AI, which can both take care of repetitive tasks on our behalf. These technologies free our time, lower our total spending, and ultimately help us focus our time on more critical things.

Here at Codeable, we’ve aimed to meet all our clients’ WordPress needs since our very first day. We can pair you and your requests with one of our 275+ highly-skilled, experienced, and pre-screened WordPress professionals. We guide you when you’re not 100% sure about your next step or if anything doesn’t go to plan. We offer tips through our blog and emails to expand your knowledge of WordPress.

Still, we thought one piece was missing: we wanted to provide you with a thorough solution for those recurring tasks your website requires.

That’s why today we’re releasing a new feature: Codeable Retainers.

Introducing Codeable Retainers

Today we’re happy to unveil a long-time, uber-requested, and soon-acclaimed feature for any website and eCommerce store owner: Codeable Retainers.

Retainers give you the ability to book an expert’s availability in advance for a specific and recurring task. Retainers can be your most effective way to take care of those tasks you’re required to do on an ongoing basis, such as each month.

How do Codeable Retainers work?

Retainers are fixed-price tasks you can hire a Codable expert for and have them take care of it for a given period of time. Anything you might need continuously or on an ongoing/recurring basis can be a retainer task. WordPress regular maintenance, security audit, custom plugin/theme updates, are perfect examples you could make Retainers for and get them addressed for as long as you need.

Top 4 benefits of using a Retainer

1. You won’t find yourself searching for new expert constantly
2. You’ll get to work with an expert who is already familiar with your project
3. You’ll be able to budget better and manage unexpected costs
4. You’ll get peace of mind knowing you are covered

How can you start with Retainers?

Once you have a recurring task in mind, you’d need to hire an expert and agree with them on the details and a recurring price up front. After both parties are on the same page and are ok with the due price, the expert will create a Retainer for your specific task in our application and you’ll get automatically billed each month for it. Lean and neat!

Note: we’re already working on the possibility for you to pick and create a retainer task right from the beginning. For now, though, you’d need an expert to create one for you.

Ready to start with Retainers?

START YOUR RETAINER NOW!

If you have any questions or might need additional info at any point, reach out to Codeable support and we’ll be happy to help you out ?

The post Your WordPress Life Is Now Much Easier: Introducing Retainers At Codeable appeared first on Codeable.

This week we turn 4-years-old ??✌️!

To celebrate our birthday in the best possible way, we’re releasing our New Year’s Overhaul deal with 93% off its regular price! Check this page for detailed info. Note: we’re running this deal for four days only, January 10th through 13th.

Since we didn’t want to bother you with a boring excel spreadsheet listing numbers about us, we kneaded and then baked the key data into this tasty Codeable pie:

We’d really like to thank each and every one of you, readers, clients, and experts because you enabled us to reach this far.

Here’s to a fantastic 2017!

The post Hello 2017 – Meet The 4-Year-Old Codeable! appeared first on Codeable.

Foreword

I’m not here to give some sort of Product Development 101 class but let me tell you one important thing. When you’re working on the next version of your product, you should follow one rule that has proven to be the most effective in the latest years: ask your customers for feedback and listen to what they say.

That might sound simplistic to some, but at the end of the day, this information is a product development goldmine.

In our specific scenario – users (WordPress experts and clients) with widely varying needs, backgrounds, and experiences – the discussion took a lot of time and resources, but what we’ve accomplished marks a huge step ahead for Codeable and everyone involved.

That’s why, on behalf of the whole Codeable team, I’d like to say a big, precious and sincere “Thank you!” to our clients and experts.

The new Codable application

So what does the new and enhanced version of the Codeable application bring in? Let me share the most interesting features.

A fresh new responsive design (with a new look too)

This was one of the most requested features and starting now, Codeable’s new application features a responsive design. This means clients will be able to communicate with experts on the fly from mobile devices and take care of projects as they would normally do from a laptop/desktop.

We’ve also changed the overall look-and-feel so it now conveys an even more professional look and provides an improved UX.

Several workroom improvements

We’ve entirely redesigned the workroom environment. Specifically, we’ve laid out and repositioned elements in the UI to let clients manage their projects more effectively and improve the communication flow with their experts.

On the other end, we’ve also tweaked the calculator to an extent that, if you’re one of our experts, it’ll be way easier to check your earnings and how much your clients will be charged.

But we didn’t stop there. Since we take good care of our experts and want them to work according to their own schedule (so the quality isn’t affected), we’ve introduced the expert’s availability feature so that they can quickly set their availability for new projects.

On top of all that, we’ve also fixed some bugs we’ve seen in the past, improved the user-friendliness of the application as a whole and improved some other aspects to make the experience run smoother.

Want to see all of this for yourself?

Log in now

One final note: we welcome your feedback, so if have anything you’d like share… don’t be afraid, just do it. And once again, thank you 🙂

The post Introducing The New Codeable Application appeared first on Codeable.

Yes, Codeable is now a 3-year-old super happy company!

We’ve experienced such a tremendous response from the WordPress community along the road, and have clients and experts around the world telling us how we’ve been able to change their lives for the better. In these 3 short years, we’ve been able to achieve some pretty incredible milestones, but that’s something you already know.

So here’s a cool infographic summing up never-released data you might find interesting:

Here’s to a fantastic 2016 and we wish y’all the very best!

The post It’s Codeable’s 3rd birthday: look how far we have come together appeared first on Codeable.