It has to be said. I love WordPress for websites. It seems like there is almost nothing it can’t do with a bit of customization. Best of all, it’s open source so the sky’s the limit and there are lots and lots of people developing custom themes, widgets, and plugins all packaged up and ready to go for endless fun and experimentation.
WordPress started out as a very customizable blogging tool, but it has developed into a pretty powerful content management package. You don’t even have to choose to add a blog to your site at all. Once everything is set up, it’s relatively easy to make content changes so that someone who’s not fully versed in web development jargon such as HTML, CSS, and PHP can still make changes on their own without too much fear of breaking something.
There’s a lot to be said for content management websites that are fully developed from scratch, but then web users often tend to get locked into using a particular web developer whenever they need to make changes to the site. (Not an issue if you’re developing your own site of course!)
As I’ve been wanting to start doing more with web and social media on a professional level, I’ve started up another website and have been messing around with logo design and basic layout. Again I decided on WordPress for overall content management, though I don’t plan to make it blog-based like this site. Mind you, it will still have a blog but just not themed around a blog as the main content.
I got sidetracked when I came to make my post here as there were new available for Headway, plugins, and WordPress itself…and two of my plugins stopped working correctly when the updates were completed. Smooth slider that use for my “featured posts” slider was somehow displaying all three featured posts at once and was HUGE. It was skewing up everything on the page. Also, the plugin I use for my tweets wasn’t displaying any tweets.
I fixed the Smooth Slider issue, but the tweets are still a mystery. It could be my fault though since the Headway theme I’m using was having an issue with Twitter plugins and I’d modified one of the core files to get it to work. Since the update, that’s probably been overwritten. Also, the update notes stated that Headway should now work with all plugins, so maybe there isn’t a Twitter issue anymore. I’ll need to investigate it a bit more. It’s possible it could even be a Twitter problem since my a.girl.IRL gaming blog has been unable to display tweets periodically throughout the day.
Special thanks to Felipe Lavin for the use of I Love WordPress under the Creative Commons license.
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