Pablo Olondriz & his journey to a successful WordPress blog

Hi everyone!

My name is Pablo. Today I want to share with you my personal story, mostly related to web design. So hope that you can be inspired a bit and have a good time reading this.

My first personal blog

I finished university in Barcelona, Spain three years ago. After that, I took my savings (around 3.000€ – earned from working for a startup) and bought a plane ticket to Malaysia with no plans. I lived in a beautiful island called Langkawi for a few months while working at a place where we rented motorbikes for tourists. After that I went to do meditation in a monk temple in Thailand, discovered a paradise permaculture farm with bamboo huts. I traveled to many more places and I was kinda penniless after that. But it was an amazing 8-month experience that opened my mind and I met a lot of incredible people along the way.

During that time, I made a personal blog to share everything that happened to me and what I felt. I even wrote a book about it and I translated it into English, titled ‘Without Return Ticket’. If you’re interested, you can find it here in Amazon.

Back to my hometown, I decided to fulfill another dream: being an online entrepreneur.

Lots of lessons learned

I wanted to build a solid business so that I could travel around the world and visit every place without worrying about money. I partnered with one of my best friends and with almost no means, we tried to set up several projects.

One of them was a rock music site called enjoythedivision.com and it was the first time I learned how to buy a domain and a hosting, how to set up a WordPress account and learn about SEO, SEM, Analytics, email marketing, A/B testing and all these challenging things.

I found DesignWall theme club through Google search and we decided to use DW Focus as the theme for enjoythedivision.com. It was perfect for our magazine site. For some reasons, we had to close the site after sometimes as the business didn’t work out the way we expected. However, this first experience taught me a lot of valuable lessons regarding building an online business.

We tried to make one mobile app and two more websites but unfortunately, we failed again. At first, we thought it was going to be a clean and straight road to success, but soon we found ourselves making every kind of mistake you can make when trying to be an entrepreneur. We spent 500€ on an office that we only used for one day! And it was really hard for me. I was almost 26 and still living with my parents and completely broke.

But yeah, the huge comfort is that I had the chance to learn lots of things. Deep down inside, I knew I had to keep moving forward and not letting go of the dream. I learned many technical things, yes, but the important was the learning about life itself, about how important it is to be humble, patient, to be present and know how to manage my own expectations.

Few months ago, I started off with another web project again. Two young girls were selling necklaces and they wanted to set up a website for their online store. I helped them with everything and the site www.sacbarcelona.com was born. The site is still in its early stage so the design looks a bit “basic”, but soon we’re going to improve it and get ready for Christmas! I’m really happy about how fast I’m learning about my passions and how life is helping me along the way.

My successful project with DW Minion theme

Not intend to stop there, I took advantage of knowing how to properly build a website and started setting up another personal blog at www.olondriz.com. I wanted the site to look professional yet minimal at the same time, so I took a look at Designwall’s showcase again. I found the responsive WordPress blog theme DW Minion and soon fell in love with it. And guess what? It’s totally free, no less!

The left hand side menu bar looks fresh, the theme was really beautiful, clean and served my purpose perfectly. I didn’t have to do much tweaking, just added a header image with my name, change the colors, pictures and added 3 more banners to the right side to promote my books and services as a web designer.

DW Minion – More Info DW Minion – Live Demo

I believe that building a website is not something that you do in one week or month and stop when it’s finished. I like to observe it, try a new color or typo, change a few things here and there, watching it evolve with my new tastes and ideals. It’s a never ending project towards better performance.

And for all of this, the most important is to be able to ask any question at any time to the designers of your theme. That is THE difference I found in Designwall: the customer care. I can ask anything in the forum and on the next day I had the answer. Amazing. You pay not only for the theme itself, but to have a team behind you helping at any moment. That is invaluable.

I want to say thanks to Kyle, Jim and Dominic for being there for me. I love to meet new people, so if you want to know more about my story, just send me some message to my facebook or linkedIn accounts or leave me a comment here. Hope you had a nice time reading my story.