About Red Earth Design, Inc. https://redearthdesign.com/
Red Earth Design, Inc. is a woman-owned distributed company - there is no office and all team members work remotely. The team consists of six full- and part-time project managers, PHP and CSS developers, and graphic designers, several of whom have worked together for more than 10 years.
We specialize in supporting creative agencies, 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 our team 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 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 $25/hr. with opportunity to increase with added responsibility.
Work from anywhere. No office, no commute. Team communication is done via email, Slack chats and a project/task management tool. We also hold video conferences three to four times a month to touch base as a team along with bi-monthly check-in calls with the Red Earth Design founder/owner. Hours are flexible, but the majority of your available time needs to overlap with US business hours for timely client interactions.
Your main responsibility will 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 listen to clients well, figure out the best tools for the job, make things work for them, test thoroughly, and document the process so it’s repeatable. Our 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.
The majority of your tasks will be ones that are delegated from a project manager based on a request from a client or will be from fellow team members requesting your help figuring something out.We prefer that developers also work with one client directly so you have a consistent view into the customer service aspects of our work and have perspective and insight when we discuss as a team on how we can continue to improve how we help our 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
Access to Photoshop for opening of design files
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
Troubleshooting plugin bugs and conflicts
Email account POP3/IMAP connections/set-up
JavaScript/jQuery
SASS
XML, JSON
APIs
Initial Responsibilities
Editing content on a WordPress site
Plugin installation and configuration
Setting up a child theme on an installed WordPress site and editing the templates and CSS to match a design example
Testing a series of custom features in a site
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 one project. Back-up contact for some projects when a project manager is out for for an extended time.
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 in Evernote 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 and set up a flexible content or repeater 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 “Peopleâ€� 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 this, you would find another example in our internal knowledge base or research it or write it 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.
Team member posts a task to our ‘task swap’ Slack channel for an extra task they don’t necessarily want to do. You can grab it if you’re interested, or let someone else pick it up You can swap tasks you have, too.
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 go through the 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 our Professional Development site, where we each take the opportunity to learn about something we’ve been wanting to or learned while working on a project or listening to a podcast or reading, and share it back to the group.
Join the regular team video call, 3 times a month on average, where we catch up, share highlights and lowlights from what we’ve been working on, and learn something new from a team member’s presentation or project debrief, or talk through ideas or business development.
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
Text editor or IDE capable of editing WordPress code
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.
What are your hobbies outside of work?
Attach a resume.
Accepting application responses and resumes at jobs@redearthdesign.com
To apply: jobs@redearthdesign.com