Awesome Ideas: Skills Swap

Back when I first moved over to a self-hosted WordPress site in 2012, I enlisted the help of my multi-talented best friend and metamour Amanda to help make my blog and its extensive archives look good in the shiny new template I’d found. Four years on and the site was looking a bit dated, so I hunted around for another template and asked Amanda if she’d be up for doing all the techie bits again. Thankfully, she said yes and so the pretty revamped site you see before you (which looks a hell of a lot better on a mobile device than the previous version!) is the result of much poking and tweaking over the weekend.

We were chatting in our local on Friday night about various things, including this WordPress work and Amanda’s new knitting workshops, when another project cropped up. Every time Amanda wants photos to show off her Epic Ballet Skills, I offer up my skills as photographer… and then we neglect to make actual plans and end up forgetting all about it for a bit. This time, we decided to initiate a skills swap and trade photography for WordPress wizardry, so an early start was planned for Saturday in order to make the most of the morning light and we both agreed it was definitely worth it!

If you have talented friends and talents of your own, I’d highly recommend a skills swap. It’s useful for people without the cash to pay for services but who also appreciate that you shouldn’t expect anything for free when it takes someone else a lot of time and effort to produce. My photography skills don’t build a website and Amanda’s WordPress skills can’t create a set of photographs, but combine the two and everyone’s happy. Creating amazing photographs is so much easier when you have such a wonderful subject though!