Warning: Geeks Only!
OK, you’ve been warned, here goes. I’ve lived through the evolution of web development from hand coding HTML to the wonderful world of WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver. And for about a year I’ve been building sites with the incredibly popular open source blogging platform called WordPress. That’s right, I build web sites with blog software.
WordPress is best known as a blogging platform, and it is excellent in that capacity, but it supports the creation and management of static “pages” (like the one you’re reading right now) as well as “posts” that automatically roll up to any number of aggregated category pages (like the examples of my work that you can view by kind of work, by kind of company, or by specific company). The combination of static pages and topical posts is powerful because you can use pages to convey information that doesn’t change much, and blog posts to continuously add new information to your site, even if you’re not “blogging” per se.
I like to think of building sites+blogs with WordPress as my “secret weapon” because from what I’ve seen not many people are doing so, but the biggest advantage of my secret weapon is how open and popular the platform is. I have yet to run into functionality that would otherwise be WAY over my head that I couldn’t add to a site thanks to a plugin built by somebody in the massive open source community that surrounds WordPress. Things like sophisticated contact forms, discussion forums, photo albums and member’s only content. Plugins also add awesome back-end functionality like the automatic generation of xml sitemaps, an integrated link checker and automatic search engine optimization. To learn more, go read up on what I’ve done for hollybarr.com, thetachisjsu.com, solacesystems.com and this site itself.
As far as laying pages out, it took me a while to transition from old-school table-based page layout to the much more sophisticated magic of CSS, but my pals Brent and Sylvie finally pushed me over the edge. Now thanks to some training (and ongoing expert assistance) from Sylvie, I couldn’t be happier. It’s amazing the kind of things you can do with and the magic of cascading style sheets for formatting and layout.