My WordPress Career: Ceyoncé

My WordPress Career is an employee spotlight on the StellarWP blog. In each edition, we highlight a different team member’s professional journey. 

While each story is unique, they all demonstrate that there isn’t one single way to arrive at a career in WordPress. Our team members come from different backgrounds, and each person brings a different type of expertise to their role. And we think that’s pretty stellar.

Today, we’re talking to Ceyoncé, Creative Director for the StellarWP Marketing team.

StellarWP: What was your very first job? Tell us what your duties entailed.

Ceyoncé: My first job was as a buyer at Plato’s Closet. I examined and judged the clothes people brought into the store to resell. I quickly learned that I had a discerning taste. 

I also started working as a receptionist at a local salon, which sparked my five-year career doing hair. If I were able to build a career doing editorial work, I’d probably still be doing hair.

But, long story short, I started in fashion and now I’m here in WordPress. It really was a lateral move that everyone could have (and should have) predicted.

What’s your current job at StellarWP? What do your duties include now?

My current job at StellarWP is as Creative Director for the StellarWP Marketing team. My current duties include covering a lot of ground.

On the one hand, I work very closely with my fellow marketing directors to discuss, develop, and execute strategies for every brand within StellarWP. 

On the other hand, I work closely with my team of designers to produce (in my humble opinion) the best visualizations for any WordPress brand and, with my content marketing manager, Alexis Bryan, to produce (again, humility) the best content for WordPress users.

My duties have also included working with engineering and development teams to ensure they have all of the information they need to implement and deploy what my team develops.

When did your career shift toward WordPress?

My life shifted toward WordPress about 12 years ago when I started my first blog website on my journey to becoming a journalist and art critic. Since then, WordPress has been a huge part of my content journey.

When I was editor-in-chief of the Metrosphere, we published everything on a WordPress site maintained by Metropolitan State University of Denver and then published full issues to Issuu. 

But we built and published our second issue as primarily digital, so we built an entire subsite for it. We did that because the theme of the year was “Performativity” and I wanted a way to showcase performance and 4D art. So my incredible Art Director, Kenzie, coded the entire site alongside their partner, Edward, to build the site.

That experience proved to me that you could do anything you set your mind to with WordPress.

After that, I worked for 303 Magazine and then with various agencies to develop content for websites across myriad industries. From skincare to surveillance to roofing, I gained a wealth of experience and knowledge I never expected.

Is there anything you learned on your first job that you carried with you to your current role at StellarWP?

Other than my discerning eye for trends and taste, not a lot, but my career as a hairstylist taught me so much.

My earliest professional mentor was Steven Trujillo (RIP), and he taught me so much about confidence, communication, and balance. 

Confidence in terms of being okay with reminding people who I am, especially as a queer, non-binary person, and what my credentials are. Communication in terms of being as transparent as possible about why things are happening and why they’re important. And then balance in terms of color, design, and curation.

A fun story I love to relive is Steven asking me to rearrange flower arrangements on display in the salon or to move things around in the garden outside the salon. I was young and wasn’t paying attention to the lessons he taught me, but once I got into magazine production and art criticism, those lessons were so apparent.

Now, to me, balance among elements is about so much more than what we see, it’s also the experience of each element and how it affects perception.

How is working in WordPress different from other jobs you’ve had? What do you like best? Are there any parts that are more challenging?

I have always been a WordPress advocate, but when I returned to WordPress at StellarWP, I quickly applied my knowledge of website design, website UX, website content, SEO, and CRO to multiple projects I’ve worked on. I actually fell in love with WordPress again because of the sheer amount of tools available that make my everyday tasks so much easier.

The last time I worked alongside a front-end developer to build pages, I had to do it all with Beaver Builder. That was a nightmare for me since I was working on optimizing content and layout. I was making changes to websites every day, and I would screw up major blocks of content on a page without knowing it.

What do you wish you had known when you first started working in the WordPress world?

I wish I had known what “open source” means. I didn’t realize how spoiled I was as a content expert in terms of working with a dev team and saying, “Add Google Tag Manager and Yoast” or “Make sure we have the Facebook Pixel added to the site”.

Yeah, I got good at updating page content with BB, but I recently got so upset thinking about how easy it is to update content with Gutenberg.

I get physiologically upset thinking about how much easier my life would have been with Kadence.

What are some of your hobbies, interests, or pastimes outside of work? How did you get started? What is a favorite memory?

I have an extensive toy collection, which includes my 200+ feminist Funko! Pops. My collection also includes Barbie, Little People (thanks, Zach Tirrell), and Lego figures. I do also have to admit that I am a junkie when it comes to books and magazines.

Most of my collections started during the pandemic. But my books and magazines started as a result of academia.

My favorite memory is my family gathering to celebrate my magazine’s Volume 3 publication. I also received awards for my work with the magazine, so having the familia with me meant so much.

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