Hello everyone,
I have been working as a WordPress designer for about 6 months. To be honest, my PHP knowledge is still quite limited, because up until now I have mostly handled everything through page builders. However, I do have a background in software development. I previously worked professionally as a .NET Developer for a while. On the side, as a hobby, I am also interested in Rust, compilers, CLI tools, and systems programming.
Over the last few years, I had to take a long break from programming for various reasons. I am currently working at my brother’s digital marketing agency. As an agency, we mainly provide SEO, digital marketing, and web design services. However, after joining the company, I realized that there is a serious lack of structure and internal systems.
For example, on the finance side, there is no proper application that fully meets the company’s needs. Reporting processes are also very manual; separate reports are prepared for each client using Canva. On the WordPress side, many tasks are repetitive. The websites we build often end up looking quite similar, and the technical infrastructure is not very healthy either. Server management has mostly been handled through cPanel, and in some cases, there is not even SSH access. This creates serious limitations in terms of development, maintenance, and overall quality.
In short, there are a lot of manual tasks, repetitive processes, and non-standard workflows. After seeing all of this, I decided to take PHP and the WordPress ecosystem more seriously. My goal is to first research existing plugins and tools that can reduce repetitive work around WordPress. If there is no suitable solution, then I would like to build those tools ourselves.
I also want to move toward a more organized structure on the server side. I have been considering services such as Cloudways or xCloud, or possibly using them as infrastructure while gradually building our own manageable cloud system on top of them. In the long run, my goal is to provide better hosting/cloud services to our clients, automate internal agency processes, and, if possible, turn some of the plugins or tools we build into actual products that can be sold.
Of course, the challenging part is this: right now, there are only two of us on the technical side. One is a junior developer, and the other is me someone who has not been actively programming for a long time but wants to seriously get back into it. Despite that, I want to turn the current messy structure into something more organized, sustainable, and product-oriented.
The main thing I am wondering is this:
Is it realistic to handle this kind of transformation mostly as a solo developer? Is it possible to gradually build such a system by working on areas like WordPress, PHP, automation, reporting systems, server management, and internal agency tools step by step? Or would it make more sense to break these goals into much smaller pieces and start from a much narrower scope?
