Hi, I'm Miriam Schwab

I studied English literature, which sounds like it has nothing to do with what I do today — but after graduating I started providing English language services: copywriting, marketing writing, Hebrew-to-English translation. All of that content was going into websites, and the websites turned out to be far more interesting to me than the content I was creating. I had to learn more about the web, and that’s when I stumbled into the open source world of website building.

I came across WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla and started looking into all of them. WordPress was something else entirely. The theming, the plugins, the constant innovation — I was like, this is amazing. I started offering WordPress services when it was still seen as just a blogging platform. Nobody thought it could power serious business sites. But I was well positioned when people started coming around to it, and that’s how I started generating leads and building a real business.

I founded illuminea, my WordPress agency, around the time my fifth child was born — I know because she’s now 19, and that’s how I mark the milestone. I learned early on the importance of saying no to things that would stretch you too thin. I ran the agency for the next 13 years, building WordPress sites for clients across industries while raising a family, and learning more in those years than in any course or conference I’ve attended.