Jason Pearson
Background
I started building websites in 2008, freelancing for small businesses around the Dallas–Fort Worth area — restaurants, dentists, car detailers, anyone who needed a WordPress site and didn't know where to start. I taught myself PHP by reading the WordPress Codex line by line and reverse-engineering theme files. By 2009 I was building custom themes from scratch and picking up e-commerce work with early WooCommerce betas.
The Plugin Years
In November 2010, I launched WPSymposium as a WordPress plugin company. The original product was a social networking plugin suite. BuddyPress was still rough around the edges, and I saw room for a lighter alternative that gave small community sites basic profiles, forums, and activity feeds without the overhead. The plugin gained traction on the WordPress.org repository and was eventually listed on CodeCanyon. At its peak it had over 10,000 active installs.
But the plugin market got crowded. BuddyPress matured, page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder shifted what people expected from WordPress, and maintaining a free plugin against an ever-changing core became a grind. Around 2016 I stepped back from active plugin development.
The Pivot to Reviews
What I noticed during those years of building and supporting a plugin was how much time WordPress users spent trying to figure out which themes and plugins were actually worth using. The review landscape was full of affiliate-driven listicles that all recommended the same five products regardless of the question. I had opinions — grounded in years of hands-on building — and I figured that counted for something.
In 2018, I relaunched WPSymposium.com as a review site. The approach was straightforward: install the product in a clean WordPress environment, put it through real scenarios, and write up what actually happens — including the parts that don't work. No demo content polish, no cherry-picked screenshots. Every review starts from a blank sandbox.
How I Review
Every theme and plugin review on this site follows the same process. I spin up a fresh WordPress install, activate the product with default settings, and walk through it the way a real user would. If a theme looks great in the demo but falls apart when you remove the pre-loaded content, that goes in the review. If a plugin has a confusing onboarding flow, I write about it.
I've designed business sites, blogs, product review sites, and e-commerce stores over the years. That experience shapes how I evaluate things — I know what matters in practice versus what looks good in a feature list.
Off the Clock
When I'm not testing WordPress products, I'm usually tinkering with side projects. I went through a home automation phase, built a few Raspberry Pi dashboards that still run in my garage, and keep meaning to finish a woodworking bench I started two years ago. I read more documentation than fiction.