This is the first website I’ve created using WordPress. In the beginning, WP seemed really complicated and unintuitive. The settings were scattered in the menus seemingly at random. It took some time to find everything. And once everything was found, the next question was: is this it? Is this all that WP can do? It wasn’t everything, but at least in the beginning, WP did feel quite limited.
The project took a big step forward when I chose a theme for it. Choosing the theme was very difficult. I tried and discarded many candidate themes. In the theme list, there were so many options that I was overwhelmed. In the end, I think I chose the one that was suggested first and had the most installs. I was quite happy with my choice, but it was soon obvious that to use the theme for real work, I would have to buy the pro version. I did buy it, and it gave me more options.
In addition to the theme, some plugins needed to be installed. Again, the list of available plugins is a bit overwhelming. But it was pretty easy to find a contact form plugin and a quiz creation plugin and some others. These too have pro versions, but I haven’t yet needed to buy those. It would be interesting to figure out how all these themes and plugins work technically. Right now, it seems like they work by magic.
I’m happy I chose WordPress instead of trying to write all the code for this site myself. Still working with WP is a bit of a struggle. With it, I can’t easily get everything done just the way I want, but I can often reach an acceptable state. To be honest, there are a lot of features to the current site that I could never have been able to code myself. At least not in a realistic timeframe. It’s best to trust in open source and the contributions of thousands of skillful coders. I don’t have to do everything myself.
Link: WordPress.org
