LoDo WordPress development shop Crowd Favorite hiring three

Crowd Favorite Founder Alex King relocated from the Bay Area to Denver after the first Internet boom.

“I decided not to look for a job,” says King, who subsequently became one of the first freelance developers focused on popular blogging and publishing platform WordPress.

It was a good move. A decade later, Crowd Favorite is 15 employees strong and hiring. King says he plans on bringing on three new employees (a web developer, a UI/IX interaction designer and a QA tester) in the coming months.

In 2007, King worked on All Things Digital for Dow Jones & Company, and it proved to be a milestone for the platform.

“It opened people's eyes to what WordPress could do,” he says. Dow Jones “was the first large-scale publisher to use WordPress for something other than a blogging engine.”

King soon found himself turning away projects, and hired his first employees. Five years later, WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds along with Crowd Favorite.

King says he doesn't advocate custom apps to many of his clients, a group that includes AMC Networks, Simpson College and Domino's Pizza. Instead, he pushes responsively designed websites - sites optimized across multiple platforms - arguing they offer better bang for the buck.

The popularity of WordPress factors into Crowd Favorite's growth.

“One of the reasons people are going to WordPress is they're leaving proprietary CMS systems,” says King. “The fact that it's such an open platform is a huge selling point.”