My experience using wordpress

CarletonStudent
Sun, 02 Oct 2022 19:23:12 +0000
Lab Assignment, Week 3, blog, design, Digital Humanities, posting, style, web development, website, website development, WordPress

I have been developing websites for quite some time now and I am very familiar with the LAMP stack. Therefore, developing a website in WordPress was a weird experience. First of all, I am used to having complete creative freedom when I write my own website from scratch. I create every page, every system, I style every element, and I am familiar with the database. If I realize that my system needs another functionality, I quickly write it.

WordPress, on the other hand, is the opposite. I tried setting up a website using that tool this weekend and personalizing it, which was very hard. There are many constraints, especially when it comes to placing and scaling images. The style and format of pages and posts is also quite strict and it is not easy to change at all. WordPress likes to be in charge of everything and define every design detail. However, after a few minutes of exploring the tool I found a way to choose a more customized style through free online templates. WordPress contains many of those. To use them, all I had to do was press a button. Minor style changes can be made by adding a layer of CSS on top of the template through an option the system gives you. After an hour, I realized WordPress is not about working on the look and the structure of the site per se, it is a way to easily post content online. This made everything become clear and intuitive. My goal is not to make a very customized website, it is posting something online, and WordPress is excellent at it.

Once I got used to the goals and the structure of the platform I realized it is really easy to use and very effective. I can create and customize posts in a matter of seconds. I shouldn’t bother with style very much, only choose a theme that looks nice and make some minor tweaks using css. Installing plugins is easy and intuitive. But the best part is that a whole system can be created done in an hour. The website that I would take weeks to develop can be created in a couple of minutes, with a couple of clicks, which is extremely convenient.

I am currently exploring how to add new pages and create new posts. I am still not very satisfied with the looks of my site, but I am very happy with the text editor and the ease to write posts. I hope to post more content on my website on the next few days