WordPress Website Lessons – Part I
I started programming in high school in the 80s and wrote my last piece of code in 1992. I was tired of hardware and software development and decided to move in to business. I have wanted to learn website development for years but never had the time to figure it out. I used the formation of Connexius LLC as the opportunity to learn HTML/CSS. While the final result worked and had lots of cool features, it just did not look right. I took the lessons learned from the exercise and working from a template built iSupport Services’s website in about 1/5th the time. Using WordPress, Chrispoer.com was complete in under a day though in all fairness it is just a template with a few very minor changes.
So when it came time to redo Connexius.com I decided to use WordPress. So based on the pattern that had been established with my last three websites, my expectations were that this endeavor would not prove too difficult. I knew I needed to learn PHP and MySQL to get the website to work right but I did not believe that would provide too much of a challenge after working with HTML/CSS over the last 6 months. While not complete, the final result is up “HERE” working basically as I had envisioned. However, the lesson learned and the whole purpose of this BLOG is to warn casual/new developers like myself to respect the technology that goes in to WordPress. Selecting a theme and importing it is trivial. If you select a good theme, adding new web pages is also very straightforward. However, if on the other hand you want to make wholesale changes to the theme, be very careful and at least double the expected development time. The WordPress loop is not trivial and understanding all of the functions and databases well enough to build a fresh website is not for the faint of heart.
The moral of the story, if you want to use WordPress and cannot find a theme that is a perfect fit, hire an expert. Trust me, it is well worth the money in the long run.