Meet Lisa Sanovski, Web Developer

Lisa Sanovski is a freelancer who does web development work for clients, mostly for small to medium sized businesses. She has been building websites for clients for the last five years or so, mainly on WordPress. Over the years, Lisa has come across a number of web hosts; most have been good but some have been not-so-good. Bluehost is one of the latter. Lisa started websitehostingrating.com as a place to post her reviews of Bluehost.com and other web hosting offerings.

1. When someone who has never built a website before tells you they want to start a website, what's the first thing you tell them?

I usually tell them that their website will be built on WordPress which is the exact same platform that many of the Fortune500 brands like News Corp and Sony Music use to build websites, and the reaction I get is often, "Wow," followed by "Oh, and how much is that going to cost me?"

That's the beauty of building websites using WordPress; it powers more than ¼ of all sites on the Internet; it's secure; and because it's open source, it's 100% free use. There are a bunch more compelling reasons why you should WordPress, nicely compiled here.

2. I used to think of WordPress as being more suited for blogs, but over the years, I've seen it used more and more for websites that are fairly static. What's your advice to people who want a website but don't want to be regularly updating it like a blog?

Yeah that's right: WordPress started out as blogging platform, but today it can be used to do so much more. It can power full blown ecommerce sites and run company intranets, online forums, job boards. And it has loads of more uses. I would say it depends on the industry you are in, whether or not you should regularly update your website with more blog-type content. Most clients I create sites for are more static, set and forget type ones.

3. What's your process like in building websites for clients? Do you mostly get people set up with WordPress, and then they carry on with refining and updating their site?

The thing is, anyone can learn how to use WordPress and update their website's content. I think that is one of the main reasons why I love working with WordPress, and regularly use it to build websites, because it's so easy to master. So once the design is more or less locked in, I do a bit of training with the client, and they will learn how to refine and update their own website.

4. What inspired you to start your website about web hosting?

The main reason why I started my honest Bluehost review site was to provide a more of an honest and unbiased review of Bluehost, based on my own personal experience of using them for clients and personal sites over the years. Because Bluehost has a fairly generous affiliate marketing program, there are loads of review sites out there, sites that are more interested in earning an income from referring signups to Bluehost than to provide people with real honest facts.

5. In the five years that you've been doing web development, what changes have you seen--and are there other changes you think might be on the horizon?

That's a really great question. Gosh, there have been so many changes over the years, from one page layouts, parallax scrolling, flat designs, video backgrounds, just to name a few. Looking into the crystal ball, I think the mobile first approach is here to stay; you know, people and "users" of websites are more and more on their mobile devices and expect websites to load fast and display well no smaller screens, and web developers and designers have to adjust to that.

Thanks, Lisa!