The Wonderful World of WordPress and How I Came About to using it; The WPstory

Word­Press has had the largest impact in my career as a web developer/designer, and of course as a blog­ger. Well, it was the dis­cov­ery of Word­Press and learn­ing the break tag isn’t as cool as it sounds.

Word­Press has not only changed the way I pub­lish con­tent, build func­tion­ing web­sites, but has started to make me money. I work as a free­lance Word­Press designer (mostly spe­cial­iz­ing in the The­sis Frame­work), and I think if it weren’t for Word­Press then I would have been screwed, and many oth­ers would have been as well. Screwed as in hav­ing a web dom­i­nated by Blogspot blogs. Ahhhh!

So here it is, here is my Word­Press story. I call it the WPstory because that’s what a Word­Press user like me does. Stick “WP” in front of any­thing and you have a mil­lion dol­lar prod­uct. I got inspired to write this story from my awe­some host, WPWeb­Host, and the com­pe­ti­tion they are hold­ing for $3,000 worth of prizes. See, they stuck “WP” in front of their title and are now the host to be at!

The vot­ing period is over and the folks at WPWeb­Host have cho­sen the win­ners! The judges seemed to have liked this post the best and it won first place in the fan­tas­tic con­tent! Read more in the announce­ments post!

Why Not Blog­ger? Why WordPress?

If I can be hon­est, the only rea­son I used Word­Press is because I thought it was the only blog­ging plat­form around that you could self-host. I didn’t hear about other stuff like Expres­sio­nEngine, or Mov­able­Type, or even that god­for­saken Joomla!, just Word­Press. So I went with it.

At first, I was a bit over­whelmed with any­thing I could do, because I have never been in an admin panel of any­thing other than a free hosted phpBB forum. But I feel like I quickly adapted to the admin panel and what could do what

I think I started out on Word­Press 2.5.x, when it was a lot more option light than 2.7 is. I think if I were to start out on Word­Press 2.7, I would have a lot more con­fused than I was with Word­Press 2.5.

Design­ing WordPress

I’m not going to lie, fig­ur­ing out how to design Word­Press for the first time was a b****. I mean, when I first started design­ing in gen­eral, they were sim­ple sta­tic HTML pages. Then I moved to Word­Press, and for the weird­est rea­sons I couldn’t fig­ure out how to get a two col­umn theme. I could do it on a sta­tic page in one file, but when the tem­plates got split into more files, I was thrown off by it.

I think if it weren’t for the amaz­ing Word­Press com­mu­nity, how­ever, I would have been screwed in my endeav­ors to design for Word­Press. The Word­Press com­mu­nity, being every­one who used Word­Press lit­er­ally pumped out thou­sands of arti­cles on how to design for Word­Press. Arti­cles rang­ing from begin­ner tuto­ri­als to more advanced, any­thing I wanted to do was pub­lished somewhere!

Where I Stand now in Word­Press Design

I feel like I have really come to under­stand Word­Press so much bet­ter. I think every time I go into a file in my FTP to edit some­thing, I learn some­thing new.

A few of my Word­Press designs:

Blogussion.com

This is prob­a­bly my best work as a Word­Press designer. I own this blog, Blo­gus­sion, and have spent much time per­fect­ing the design. The design is on a dark theme, and all through­out the design you will notice a sense of orga­ni­za­tion. Smooth gra­di­ents are used all around the design to add a nice pro­fes­sional touch to it.

Teenius.com

My good friend Simon con­tacted me one day for a new design of his blog, Tee­nius. We sent some emails back and forth, shot over a few IMs and I came up with a bril­liant design for his blog. It uses smooth gra­di­ents as well, and a lot of empha­sis is put into his logo, which over­laps very nicely in the header.

Agentsoltuions.com

A design I think turned out really nice, I made this one for a client of mine Jen­nifer Wil­son. The design has smooth col­ors in it, and cool icons in the side­bar and header that pop out (my favorite effect).

I have other Word­Press designs out there, but most of them are unfin­ished client projects. I’m going to have a big show­case of them soon, so stick around for that!

13 Rea­sons Why You Should Use WordPress

To fin­ish this post up, I made a list of 13 rea­sons why you should use Word­Press. You have prob­a­bly seen these lists else­where, but I think it’s a great end­ing to a post of this nature!

1. Word­Press is free

Unlike other plat­forms (which quite frankly suck), Word­Press is free. So there’s no need to pay for a CMS because Word­Press exists.

2. Really, any host can run it

I haven’t heard of a host that couldn’t sup­port Word­Press, and if it can’t then it’s prob­a­bly a crappy host. There are so many great web hosts out there, and there’s even a host that is solely ded­i­cated to host­ing Word­Press blogs!

3. Setup is no problem

All you need to do is cre­ate a data­base, upload some files and you’re set. Yeah, seriously.

4. Tons of qual­ity support

WordPress.org has a pretty good sup­port forum, but that’s just the tip of the ice­berg. There are hun­dreds of web­sites out there ded­i­cated to sup­port­ing Word­Press, and if you need help with a plu­gin or theme, then the chances are there is help for you somewhere.

5. Design­ing it your­self is easy

If you want to design it your­self, then you don’t need to know all that much. You just need to know the Word­Press Tem­plat­ing Sys­tem, some CSS and you’re set mostly. But you can sim­plify it even fur­ther with the The­sis frame­work.

6. Find­ing some­one to design is just as easy

Many peo­ple use Word­Press to make a liv­ing off of, so there are plenty of experts out there who can design for you as a free­lance project.

7. Thou­sands of awe­some 3^RD party plugins.

It’s crazy how many plu­g­ins there are for Word­Press. Rang­ing from free to paid, there are lit­er­ally thou­sands of great plu­g­ins to cus­tomize your blog with.

8. Thou­sands of premium/free themes

The pre­mium theme mar­ket is explod­ing, and free themes are always great to start a blog off with.

9. You don’t need much tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to man­age it

If you just stick with buy­ing or down­load­ing a theme, then the most tech­ni­cal knowl­edge you need is to know how to nav­i­gate through your FTP to get to where the theme folder needs to go!

10. It does every­thing for you

Word­press makes every­thing auto­matic. It cre­ates a RSS Feeds for you, archives posts auto­mat­i­cally, and a lot more.

11. The admin panel is sexy

It has a good look­ing, pretty straight­for­ward admin panel. All of your options are located onto a side­bar to the left, and it is very customizable.

12. You can update your blog anywhere

There are many 3^RD party pro­grams out there that allow you to post from any­where. Your phone, even your email for example.

13. Mul­ti­ple authors can access it

If you want to run a blog with a friend, it’s no prob­lem at all. You can reg­is­ter them, or they can reg­is­ter them­selves, and all you have to do is edit their per­mis­sions. Sim­ple enough!

There You Have It

That is my WPstory. I could have kept going on, but for the sake of my hand I’m going to stop at design because that’s really been what I have used Word­Press for the most. What’s your WPstory?

Tagged as: blogger, blogspot, WordPress, wpstory