Interview with Matt Mullenweg – Lead Developer and Head of Bug Creation – http://www.wordpress.org

[Mike] Matt, thanks for taking the time to provide the Voisd Webmaster Blog readers with and insight into your background and the workings of Wordpress. As the number one most important Matt in the world (according to Google) and the sixteenth most important person on the web (according to PC World) you are also the founding developer of Wordpress, the blogging software that runs hundreds of thousands of websites around the world. Aged at just 22 you own what could well be considered as the majority software share of the blogging community – where did you find the inspiration for this project and did you ever think that Wordpress would ever reach the popularity it has done in such a very short space of time? Did you ever dream that aged just 22 you could have made such an impact on the internet world?

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Interview with Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads – http://www.text-link-ads.com

[Mike] Patrick, thank you for taking the time to provide our readers with an insight into the background and operation of Text Link Ads. You are the President and co founder of TLA, a pay per click management system that you founded and have been operating since 2003. Your introduction to the world of SEO marketing was in 2000 when you helped develop your reclaimed brick and stone business online – this lead to your understanding of the importance of backlinks which progressed into the concept for TLA. Needless to say TLA is quite a jump from reclaimed brick and stone, did you ever think your SEO knowledge would progress so quickly and was the concept of TLA something you conceived when you realised the importance of backlinks or did it take some time and a lot of thought and planning for the text link ads concept to become fully developed?

[Patrick] It definitely took time to evolve. We started up as a pure PPC management shop in 2001 and once we started offering PPC services these same clients were interested in SEO. We found that the secret to SEO was finding ways to get links to our clients sites and came across the practice of purchasing links. At the time there was not a central marketplace bringing together advertisers and publishers who were interested in buying and selling static html links so we evolved into Text-Link-Ads.com in 2003. We started off by doing everything by hand and then took our processes and built a custom technology around them which allowed for the business to really take off.

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Interview with Lisa Sabin-Wilson of EWebscapes Blog Design Studio 

[Mike] Firstly can I say a big thank you for agreeing to take the time to participate in this interview. I tend to say a big thank you to anyone who agrees to provide the Voisd Webmaster Blog and its readers with an insight into the running of their business however your schedule appears to be fuller than most at the moment due to you agreement to undertake the task of writing the official “Wordpress for Dummies” book for Wiley Publishing. This is obviously an excellent opportunity although thoroughly deserved, how did such an opportunity arise?

[Lisa] A big thank you right back for your interest, Mike. My schedule is extremely full right now, especially with the WordPress for Dummies project. It has been quite a large project that eats up the majority of my time, lately. I am, however, almost finished with it, so hopefully I’ll be able to get things back to ‘normal’ - whatever that means.

The WordPress for Dummies project came about through a referral from a colleague of mine, Susie Gardener from Hop Studios.

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Interview with Matt Wallis, CEO of United Hosting – http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk

Matt, thank you for taking the time to participate in this online interview for the Voisd Webmaster Blog.

[Mike] United Hosting is just one part of United Communications, a much larger quality internet based service founded in 1998. How did United Hosting start and was it based on a natural business progression from one of your earlier projects?

[Matt] Our Company started life as Datatechnics UK Limited, providing local small/medium businesses with IT support and maintenance contracts. We installed IT requirements to many local businesses in the Hertfordshire area which would include such things as networks, internet connectivity and of course web hosting and email services. By 2000 our hosting services had outgrown our IT support contracts and we renamed to a more appropriate - United Communications Limited, with UnitedHosting being our trading name for hosted services. In the same year we allowed all our IT support contracts to expire, shifting our companies focus to 100% web hosting.

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