jayeff

And depending on how uncertain the client is about WordPress and/or you, add another 15-30 minutes talking to him/her, getting logins, etc...

Still not bad money, but so what? I can think of 3 or 4 plugins off the top of my head, which if installed as per their instructions, won't work. There are combinations of plugins which don't work, plugins which haven't been updated yet to work with the latest version of WordPress, PHP, or whatever. There are new plugins and wrinkles coming along almost every week. Which version(s) of UTW do/do not work with which version(s) of WP 2.1.#? One of the most popular plugin sources has been offline for a while: do you know where else you can get those plugins? There are more than a dozen plugins related to Tec.h.nor.ati tags: do you know what they all do and how they compare performance-wise? Do you know that the FeedBurner redirection plugin is now handled by Feedburner themselves and has a new name? Etc. Etc.

You are right. Anyone can deal with all these things themselves. As you pointed out, the knowledge is all in the public arena. But are you running a blog as a hobby or to make money from it? If it's a hobby, you may enjoy messing around "under the hood" as much as writing. Good for you, go for it! But if you don't put in an hour or two every week, keeping on top of what's new and changed, or even if you just don't do installs regularly, your 10-15 minutes is - as someone else said - going to be 2-3 hours, there are likely to be features you don't even know exist, and if you happened onto the best choices for the things you did install, consider yourself damn lucky. A simple example: look at the regular threads on this board just about how to deal with spam. Every one of those threads represents a bunch of webmasters who have spent, or are still spending time learning the hard way about just one aspect of their sites.

There are things every blogger should learn. If you don't learn CSS you are going to need help every time you want to change something (or gradually fill your theme with old-style coding). Since changes to CSS only come along every few years, that knowledge doesn't become outdated from one day to the next so you have plenty of time to get value from the investment you make in learning. But when it comes to setting WordPress up to work as well as possible, the economics are entirely different.

JP513

Hahahaha! Nice play on words, dude! Finally, someone with a good enough grasp of the language to make a clever joke like this.