👋 Hey, thanks for stopping by!
Welcome to my corner of the internet. Think of this site as the map to explore my latest adventures, ongoing projects, and everything in between. Take a look around, and feel free to connect if you want to chat!
About Me
I’m just a regular guy, doing my thing—but I am driven by an extraordinary mission: to build a meaningful life for my family and share value with the world.
You’ll find me focused on what I believe we were created to do: think, imagine, love, explore, learn, create, connect, innovate, and build.
I’ve been described as visionary. I like that. Gradually, I am learning how to turn those big ideas and dreams into helpful realities.
Below, you can delve into the stories behind my crazy work history, explore the missions of my digital product brands, get a sneak peak at the exciting inventions I’m currently working on, and follow my family’s latest adventures.
My Family
My wife Tashia and my little girls are my life. Tashia is my CFO in everything I do, my Chief Feedback Officer. Even when she couldn’t care less about one of my crazy ideas, or doesn’t understand some technical code I’m trying to explain, or is tired from her own duties, she always tries to support me, and that means everything. Family is the best, and at the core of everything I do.
How I Met Tashia
Sometime in 2016, a quiet, gorgeous young lady was inexplicably on my mind. I knew who she was from church, but had no real connection. I found myself compelled by her Instagram posts. She emphasized joy in everything, and she captured my heart in a way I couldn’t explain. She was my dream girl, so I pursued my dream.
It’s a funny story to look back on. I wrote her dad a letter, but knowing that Tashia liked to get the mail in, and wanting to keep it a secret, I Googled the US Postal Service recommendation for marking a letter private. So naturally, I wrote “PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL” in all caps on the front! Haha As the story goes, her mom handed it to her dad at the supper table, and he casually tucked it away to read later. But all the girls were extremely curious. Her sisters still joke with me about this mysterious letter.
Next, I met with her dad to talk. This is the part mentioned in my work history story on the day I got laid off from work. I was worried that the lack of a job and not much money was a negative thing, but he viewed it as a positive thing, and casually shrugged and said God would provide.
Time To Get Married
Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time with Tashia and her family, and she spent time with my family. Not wanting a traditional drawn-out dating relationship, and both being ready to move forward, I casually commented to her dad that summer, something like, “Well, now what? I guess we should get married.” He was like, “Yeah, it’s about time.” Everyone knew it was going to happen, so why not? Her family helped me set up the proposal by planning a hike to a really huge rock cliff with an awesome overlook, one of the biggest in the state. We climbed down the rock outcroppings to a ledge, and she thought I was going to get my camera out, but I surprised her by pulling out a bouquet of flowers from my cleverly disguised tripod bag. Her uncle was above photographing the whole thing. She said yes rather quickly. We joked that our faces hurt from smiling so much.
The next question was when to get married. It was the end of July now, and we both were like, “Well, we like the fall weather in the month of October.” So it was planned. We got married in October 2017, and drove off on a honeymoon around the state of Pennsylvania (quite literally).
Nothing But Love ($0)
There’s a song about living on love. Well, we did that. I was working a job with limited hours and wages, and my bank account was depleted due to wedding expenses, household furnishings, and general living costs. I typically manage the money, so I knew there was nothing left, but I didn’t want to alarm Tashia. She had such simple faith. I could tell stories about how strange and miraculous things happened. There were months when the rent, electric, car loan, gas, insurance, groceries, and other bills were definitely more than my income, and yet somehow, unexplainably, we were always able to pay our bills. I literally cringed some months when I hit “pay,” not sure if it would go through. I’m convinced that we had one of those Elijah moments when the barrel of flour and jar of oil didn’t run out. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced. It didn’t add up.
The Crazy Tale Of My Work History
It All Began In A Peach Orchard
I grew up in southern Pennsylvania and have lived in the general area all my life. I attended our private church school and enjoyed learning very much. During high school and during community college, I had the privilege of working with my uncle and cousins at their orchard. It was extremely hot, hard work, but I have no regrets. The best part was introducing them to the concept of advertising. I created a website for them, set up social media, ran local newspaper and radio ads, designed signs, and within one season at their 100th anniversary in 2011, sales increased 400%. They were stunned, as I was, too. I began to realize that this may be where my passion lay, more than just picking fruit!
Just A Number In A Cubicle
After about 10 years at the fruit farm, I was hired as a CAD drafter at a local precast concrete company. I soon realized I was just a number, confined to a cubicle in a formal office. I knew I wanted to pursue more creative endeavors, but I didn’t know how to get there. Then, after a month of no work for me and my coworkers, the inevitable happened- I was laid off. I remember getting into my car with total peace about it, as if I knew it was 100% right in spite of how negative it might feel.
Now What?
Ironically, the day I got laid off, I was scheduled to meet with my future father-in-law to talk. That may seem like poor timing, but it was truly the best timing ever.
Now that I was without a job, it was time for the next step. But what was it? I had been working on graphic and web design projects for local clients on the side, so it seemed like the natural next step was to continue my education in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in graphic design. This seemed like the only way to secure a genuine job in the field.
We Called Her Jezebel
At some point, I had applied for lots of jobs at local agencies. One day, a company reached out with a job offer to design trade show exhibits. Wow, that sounded incredible, as it would combine both my CAD experience and my design aspirations. So I dropped out of college and began working there.
Sadly, after only a few months on the job, my coworker and I discovered some extremely unethical practices occurring at this company. We were faced with the choice of walking out without a job or staying until a new opportunity arose. One day, I kid you not, the woman who ran the company threw the book at my coworker. No, I mean literally! So he walked out. Now what do I do?
I sat at my desk thinking. Thirty minutes easily passed, and I was torn between walking out and waiting. I was in agony, praying for God to show me what to do. Just then, my phone, which had been lying on my desk, randomly began to ring. We were not allowed to have phone calls, but something in me said, “answer it,” anyway. The voice on the other end said, “Hey, I got your resume and I would like to hire you. Can you come in for an interview tomorrow?” I was shocked. I didn’t even remember applying. But I had my answer!
Valuable Experience
The person who called ran a small local marketing and design agency. He had extensive experience in the industry and was highly respected by numerous local clients. It was an excellent opportunity for both of us, for him to grow his company and for me to gain experience in the industry. However, being small, he could only offer me 25 hours a week at $15/hour, which, if you do the math, isn’t enough to live on for someone with marriage majorly on his mind. But it didn’t matter; this opportunity felt too right.
I took on all of his website work, which is precisely what I wanted and was familiar with, all based on WordPress. I struggled with the graphic design side, but he was exceptional, so we balanced out nicely. I continued working there from the spring of 2017 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Since we worked with dozens of local businesses, and they all were forced to shut down, there was no work. I went home, and we initially thought we could continue remotely, but as the shutdown continued, it just didn’t make sense, and I asked him to transition me from an employee to a contractor formally.
Finding My Place In The Divi World
Before all this happened, I created some website templates for Divi, one of the popular WordPress website builders, and they were selling well, generating a few hundred dollars a month, enough to help supplement my low income.
I met a friend who was developing plugins for Divi, and he encouraged me to try it. I only had one small plugin idea, and created it and began to sell it, which also helped provide a little extra income.
During the shutdown in March 2020, I got serious about the idea of creating more plugins. But first, there had to be a problem that I could provide a solution for. I was not interested in making “nice-to-have” features, but rather one that could provide real value and functionality. I began to browse other popular themes and builder addons for ideas, hoping to find something that was available for other builders but not for Divi. I took one entire day and dedicated it to research. I spent the whole day and came up with a list of absolutely nothing. It was discouraging. I remember going for a drive that evening, praying very specifically, “God, if you want me to continue in this direction with the idea of creating plugins, then you will need to give me some inspiration, because I spent the entire day looking and researching, and there are absolutely no ideas left for something to create.”
Just then, I had an idea. But I had to check if it was possible. I went home, sent an email to a developer I knew, and went to bed. The next morning, when I checked my messages, he had replied with the plugin file. He had spent eight hours overnight creating my idea. I was blown away. Within 24 hours, I went full circle from hope to nothing to idea to reality! I listed it for sale, and the very first month it sold 500 copies.
After that, ideas continued to pour in, and I have since created over a dozen niche and utility plugins to extend the core Divi functionality, with millions of websites using our plugins.
Digital Products
I own and operate several companies dedicated to improving the lives of web designers and website owners with innovative solutions and tools centered around WordPress. You can learn more about each of these brands below.
Pee-Aye Creative
As a young married couple, my wife and I founded a web design company, officially launching our website design and maintenance services for local clients. We continue to grow the business, and as we worked with both WordPress and the Divi theme, we often faced small challenges, mostly related to “how to do this or that” in Divi or with custom code. I began publishing blog post tutorials and explainer videos every week, and soon had hundreds of them. Millions of people would come ot our site and YouTube channel to learn our tips and tricks with Divi. In a sense, Nelson at Pee-Aye Creative became a micro-celebrity in a niche community of website builders.
However, some solutions were not as straightforward as a simple code snippet to copy and paste. That’s when we began to develop plugins, which extended the core Divi builder with niche utilities and functionality. They were an instant hit, and we quickly became the top 3rd party plugin developer in the Divi community, which we still maintain to this day. Today, a dozen of our Divi plugins are used on millions of websites. Our focus at Pee-Aye Creative naturally shifted from client work to product creation, and that remains our ongoing focus. Our team has grown, and now we manage people, products, and brands rather than websites. We release new plugins each year whenever we brainstorm a new idea, and provide significant feature updates continually for our existing plugins. A huge part of our business is listening to the needs of our customers and implementing them. Thousands of small settings and features have been added due to feature requests we receive from our customers.
SurelyWP
In 2023, we started R&D to explore whether it was feasible to launch a new line of add-ons for the ecommerce platform SureCart, which was rapidly gaining popularity in the WordPress community. Their approach was different, featuring a hosted solution instead of relying solely on the WordPress site, requiring a significantly different coding strategy. After months of development, we had three prototype plugins ready to test the market. They were very small, niche, and designed to determine if the entire concept would succeed.
It did. We soon started receiving several feature requests per day, and we began developing new features and add-ons for SureCart. We started slow, invested carefully, and by year two, broke even for 4 hours. The next day, the team was paid, so we were negative again, but we are projected to be profitable very soon as our user base continues to grow steadily. We have expanded our development team and released significant updates with incredible new features for store owners and admins. We are very excited to be the first and basically only addon creator for SureCart, and we hope to continue building on everything we have learned to keep delivering solutions.
FluentlyWP
In late 2025, we decided to clone everything we had learned with our Divi addons and SureCart addons and make a new brand for the popular “Fluent” plugins. We already use and love plugins like FluentCRM, FluentCommunity, FluentForms, and the new FluentCart, so it made sense to take everything we learned in the past few years and apply it to a new brand.
We released our first addon in November 2025. I barely shared anything about it, except for one post. The response blew me away! Within a month, we had sold enough to cover the development team’s expenses. Of course, we worked on it for many months before and have startup debt, but the fact that our sales were so strong indicates this move was absolutely the right decision for us, and we are very close to releasing our second addon any day now.
We soon released our second addon, and are continuing ot add many features to both. We now have a toolkit and marketing plugin, and the sky’s the limit.
Adventure
We love to travel and explore as a family, with road trips around Pennsylvania and the surrounding states. We enjoy finding beautiful waterfalls, overlooks, natural areas, parks, and anything unique. Along the way, we have documented our favorite places and trips publicly, with photos, info, and our comments, so you can visit them too!