WordPress – First impressions
WordPress: initial thoughts…
There is no shortage of content I would like to add to the net and thus the desire to have a platform to quickly and easily put that content up is indeed appealing. Over a period of years I have made multiple attempts to utilize WordPress only to back out and continue coding the old fashioned way. That is, writing html/css/php/javascript code until it worked how I wanted. My experience each time has been similar. Amazement at how much can be achieved so quickly, followed shortly by extreme frustration to get it ‘just’ how I want.
This last foray into WordPress has been a more substantial attack. The appeal is still there as there is still many things I would like to add to the net but the time to build a custom site is daunting (my web development experience is limited). This time I have been willing to spend more time learning the requirements and I have started with a better understanding of what WordPress is and can do and yet the experience was once again quite similar as my previous explorations. Impressed at the speed a simple but attractive blog site can be implemented but still quickly frustrated at the difficulty of customizing particular elements or characteristics of a site.
My experience with the various plug-ins that I have tried has been similar. Amazing features become available at the click of a button but the complications created when one wants to move past the set features can be a headache.
Obviously this is not the norm for most people. The impression I have is that most people appear to be happy to operate within the set parameters of the WordPress developers and/or the features offered by selected plug-ins. I just always want to bend things just a little too far…
Still, I have come to learn that customization is quite possible in WordPress. There is quite a bit of learning involved, even if you are familiar with PHP (the programming language that WordPress utilizes) there is still a lot of internal functions and methods and approaches that need to be learnt to fully customize a site.